Among the New Words

Is your small business Y2K OK?” asks the poster at the US Post Office in Milledgeville, Georgia. “I’m OK with Y2K,” answers the button handed out by a bank in Macon, Georgia. We are all hoping, of course, that we have paid for expansion, a permanent fix for the millennium bug, and not for windowing, a temporary fix said to expire in 30 years or so (Milledgeville, GA, Union-Recorder 16 Mar. 1999: 4A [AP]). Just before April Fool’s Day in 1999—but months before the millennium bug was more than anything but a bothersome expense paid to a consultant—many e-mail users were surprised to find out that “an important message” from a friend contained the virus Melissa, which sent out 50 infected attachments to 50 of a user’s friends and to 50 of their friends and so forth until the information superhighway was more like a traffic jam. We were saved from Melissa (as far as we know) and also from the Chernobyl virus, which destroyed hard drives around the world on 26 April, the 13th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (Milledgeville, GA, Union-Recorder 28 Apr. 1999: 6). We also learned to fear script kiddies, hackers motivated by the sheer joy of destruction (US News & World Report 14 June 1999: 49). After apocalyptic talk about the break up of Microsoft into Baby Bills and Mini-Microsofts (Victoria, BC, Times Colonist 5 Mar. 1999: E2), we received an e-mail April Fool’s Day news article telling us that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was going to establish a new country to avoid further troubles with the US Justice Department. The report said that he was originally going to call the country Micronesia but decided on Windonesia since the first was trademarked. (If the new country had a beach, would the silicon-collar class of Microserfs become Microsurfers?) After all of this e-commotion, we agreed with the suggestion of the academic vice president of Georgia College & State University that we all needed an electronic day of rest.

However, at “Among the New Words” we were far from such a day. The students in ENGL 4115/5115 had rummaged through our files and pulled all of the words referring to computers or the Internet. We had been avoiding these words for the most part: we got disheartened when we saw how many there were, and many of them seemed to refer to things beyond our technical competence. Indeed, Paul Ivsin (who referred us to <http://www.whatis.com> for more information) had let us know that our definition of api should be expanded to include other programs besides e-mail and that the screening of users is only one of the many functions of cgi (“ATNW,” American Speech 73 [1998]: 300, 302–03). However, the students insisted that they work on computer words and began whittling down a list of nearly 600 terms to a shorter list to be printed in this installment (A-H) and in the next one (I-Z).

While we were struggling with these computer terms, others were e-publishing witty comments on the meaning of computer terms. One day the e-mail brought this anonymous poem:

Remember when . . .

A computer was something on TV From a science fiction show, A window was something you had to clean And a ram was a cousin of a goat.

Meg was the name of a girlfriend And gig was your middle finger upright, Now they mean all different things And that really megabytes.

An application was for employment A program was a TV show A cursor used profanity A keyboard was a piano.

Memory was something you lost with age A CD was a bank account And if you had a 3¹Ž2 inch floppy You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did with the garbage Not something you did to a file, And if you unzipped anything in public You’d be in jail for...