Previously: Call Them “Quals” and Against Pseudovernacular Jargon.
One time I went to a doctor’s appointment with our son for some knee pain he was having. The doctor asked where the pain was, if it was “below the kneecap”. My son and I both tried to clarify the question: “do you mean below as in under or… um, beneath, or… no, none of these words actually clarify” and finally I was like, “can you just speak Latin??”. (It turns out “subpatellar” means below the kneecap as in further into the body, as opposed to “inferior to the kneecap” / “infrapatellar” meaning closer to the foot.) Doctors may sometimes do this gratuitously but on the whole, Latin makes for surprisingly good jargon in medicine.
I’m pretty enamored with Latin myself but mostly resist subjecting Beeminder users to it. (Workerbees are another story.) I think only one bit of Greek has slipped through, with the akrasia horizon.
I know how pretentious these terms can sound. As Richard Dawkins once put it after using the zoology term Bauplan in one of his books:
Bauplan is just the German word for blueprint. Typically one switches languages to indicate profundity.
As I argued in my screed against pseudovernacular jargon, this kind of thing isn’t just about indicating profundity but indicating that it’s a technical term.
Speaking of German jargon, do you know what Freud’s terms for the ego, the id, and the superego are in the original German? “Ich”, “Es”, and “Über-ich” — literally just “I”, “it” and “over-I”. Which is also exactly what “ego”, “id”, and “superego” mean in Latin. I learned this from a bitter Twitter thread, castigating Freud’s English translator for deciding that “such an important concept needed to be made more obscure and technical sounding”. The translator’s choice seems to be widely reviled, but I’m a fan. Switching to Latin was an elegant way to avoid a particularly egregious case of (let me link you to it one more time) pseudovernacular jargon. Even more egregious in English where the word “I” is a single character and it’s hard to even tell when you’re italicizing it. Not to mention zero searchability.
If you don’t want to totally switch languages, may I suggest a foreign prefix? Consider “epicenter”. “Epi” is Greek for “on” so it just means “on the center”. Is that a pointlessly jargony version of “center”? No, when talking about earthquakes you don’t want to always have to disambiguate uses of “center” that referred specifically to being directly above the point at which the strain energy in the rock is first released. Similarly, “hypertext” elegantly jargonifies a certain kind of text. Same for “isoline” or “exoplanet”.
But switching languages isn’t the only solution to the jargoneering [1] problem. There’re always portmanteaus. Like “qubit” for “quantum bit”. (And “bit” itself is a portmanteau of “binary digit” — a nested portmanteau! [2]) Or something taken from literature, like “quark”, or astronomy’s “Goldilocks zone”.
The terminological holy grail is a well-understood word that can be given a technical definition without creating ambiguity. My favorite might be the term “overfitting” in machine learning. It feels similar to Beeminder’s “bright red line” — a technical concept that’s fully captured in a sufficiently short plain English word or phrase. [3] But these are rare. Usually you need to make tradeoffs.
Many years ago I wrote a popular post on how to make such tradeoffs for the case of naming startups and other projects (you can see how the name “Beeminder” fares, if you’re curious). So I’ll conclude by adapting that to the case of coinages in general. Here, I claim, are the core neological desiderata:
- Evocativity — conveys as much of the technical concept as possible
- Univocity — unambiguous (in particular, not pseudovernacular)
- Brevity — shorter = better
- Greppability — not a substring of common words
- Mellifluidity — alliterative, rhymey, or otherwise fun to say
It’s rare to be able to max out all five but you can aim for that and trade the desiderata off against each other. For example:
- “Akrasia” nails univocity, greppability, and brevity, sacrificing evocativity unless you know Greek
- “Bright red line” maxes out evocativity, is plenty high on univocity and greppability, but sacrifices some brevity
- “Onto” (the math term from the previous post on pseudovernacular jargon) fails so hard on greppability and univocity that its decent evocativity and brevity can’t save it
- “Pixel” (picture element) comes pretty close to “qubit” for maxing out all five
- “Phishing” is a clever misspelling that yields univocity and greppability without too much loss of evocativity
- “Bug” also scores quite high across the board, though perhaps the evocativity is a little tenuous
- “Quals” I’ve made the case for already
- “Commitment dial” is another case of sacrificing some brevity for some evocativity.
Recall Scott Alexander’s “concept handle” concept handle. Packing up a suitcase full of knowledge or insight and being able to invoke it with a single word or phrase is powerful. It’s why jargon is good, on net. The above desiderata make a concept handle easier to remember, easier to find, and easier / more fun / less confusing to actually use.
Related Reading
- Richard Feynman: if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
- Explaining something in simple terms may involve lies-to-children (and/or takes longer)
- Sapir-Whorf for Rationalists
Footnotes
[1] Jargonautics? Jargonology? Jargonatomy? Just kidding. As fun as it is to make these up, the word Neology (study of neologisms) is actually perfectly adequate. Funny story: my old blog post on how to name startups and projects is titled “Nominology” and it was only after publishing it that I learned I’d reinvented the word onomastics.
[2] The original/alternate name of Curlminder, Curlex, has portmanteaus/acronyms nested FOUR levels deep:
Curlex
├─ cURL
│ ├─ command-line
│ └─ URL fetching
│ └─ uniform resource locator
└─ regex
└─ regular expressions
As far as I know, the only way to top this (HT Brent Yorgey) is with infinitely recursive acronyms, like GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) or PHP (PHP: Hypertext Processor).
[3] Benjamin Fox (AKA zzq) rightly points out that this won’t be quiiiiite right until we eventually make the switch to the Bright Red Staircase. In the status quo, the bright red line isn’t exactly a bright red line, in that you can technically/literally cross it as long as you end the day on the right side of it. I think of “you can’t cross red line” as spiritually true even today, but I agree that it’s bothersome that it’s not fully literally always quite true. It’s true if you think of the red line Beeminder draws as a crude approximation of the true underlying red line with stair steps at each day boundary.