I have found it to be quite an effort keeping up with the new jargon being thrown up by the scientific and IT fields in recent times. I remember the first time I encountered the word “tweet”. I was nonplussed. Then someone told me it has to do with the social media organization Twitter. It was only when I opened my own Twitter account a year ago did I actually comprehend what a “tweet” was.
In his book Virtual Words: Language at the Edge of Science and Technology (2011), columnist Jonathon Keats focuses on the “interplay between words and ideas” in our fast-paced tech-driven society. The book is a compilation of 28 short essays, each focusing on a neologism. In these, Keats examines how such words are coined, why some succeed while others fail. As the author says in the preface, “What mattered most in making this selection is that each word have a noteworthy history and that collectively they embody the diversity of scientific and technological language today.”
Take for instance the word “microbiome”. This word was coined by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg and refers to “the collective genome of all microbes hosted by the human body”. According to Lederberg, the Human Genome Project by itself would not succeed. To study the evolution of humans and how various parts interact, one must consider the genome along with its concomitant mitochondria and the microbiome since they are a “shared embodiment”.
Thus the microbes are fellow travelers whose genetic legacy is inseparable from ours. For instance, they facilitate digestion and also aid the immune system. As Keats says, “We could not survive without our microbiome any more than our cells could subsist without mitochondria….” Thus to study humans better we need a microbiome project. Herein lies the challenge: human DNA contains approximately 23,000 genes. The microbiome may contain as many as 23 million!
Let us take another example: the cloud. Media started writing about cloud computing in 2006. In this year, Amazon and Google offered “web services” in which idle servers could be rented to businesses needing additional computer power on a provisional basis. But now cloud computing is made vague and refers to “everything that we already do”. As Keats says, “The cloud is everything that the web does. In that respect the term has to be vague. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be accurate.”
There are other words that Keats discusses such as “in vitro meat”, “copyleft” and “crowdsourcing”. All these have interesting histories and promise to enrich our language. And isn’t that a lot? As Keats puts it, “Language can’t talk us out of environmental Armageddon. But at least we can have some say in our fate – on our desktops and on our planet – by mastering our metaphors rather than being mastered by them.”
In his book Virtual Words: Language at the Edge of Science and Technology (2011), columnist Jonathon Keats focuses on the “interplay between words and ideas” in our fast-paced tech-driven society. The book is a compilation of 28 short essays, each focusing on a neologism. In these, Keats examines how such words are coined, why some succeed while others fail. As the author says in the preface, “What mattered most in making this selection is that each word have a noteworthy history and that collectively they embody the diversity of scientific and technological language today.”
Take for instance the word “microbiome”. This word was coined by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg and refers to “the collective genome of all microbes hosted by the human body”. According to Lederberg, the Human Genome Project by itself would not succeed. To study the evolution of humans and how various parts interact, one must consider the genome along with its concomitant mitochondria and the microbiome since they are a “shared embodiment”.
Thus the microbes are fellow travelers whose genetic legacy is inseparable from ours. For instance, they facilitate digestion and also aid the immune system. As Keats says, “We could not survive without our microbiome any more than our cells could subsist without mitochondria….” Thus to study humans better we need a microbiome project. Herein lies the challenge: human DNA contains approximately 23,000 genes. The microbiome may contain as many as 23 million!
Let us take another example: the cloud. Media started writing about cloud computing in 2006. In this year, Amazon and Google offered “web services” in which idle servers could be rented to businesses needing additional computer power on a provisional basis. But now cloud computing is made vague and refers to “everything that we already do”. As Keats says, “The cloud is everything that the web does. In that respect the term has to be vague. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be accurate.”
There are other words that Keats discusses such as “in vitro meat”, “copyleft” and “crowdsourcing”. All these have interesting histories and promise to enrich our language. And isn’t that a lot? As Keats puts it, “Language can’t talk us out of environmental Armageddon. But at least we can have some say in our fate – on our desktops and on our planet – by mastering our metaphors rather than being mastered by them.”
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