Deirdre Macken, The Australian Financial Review, 10 August 2001
Not only is the internet revolution changing the way we live, it's also changing the way we speak. Deirdre Macken reports. A few weeks ago, Quentin Jones of Gresham CEA Management came across the term "lean-in" media during a meeting with an entrepreneur. Jones picked up the meaning without having to ask (one doesn't) because the physicality of the words gave a picture of their meaning (lean-in media being an interactive, screen media as opposed to lean-back media, which is quickly identifiable to old couch potatoes).
He barely had the time to try the expressions on fellow jargonauts when, within 24 hours, a US colleague used the expression in an e-mail to him. Lean-in media has yet to make it on to internet jargon sites but it has a good chance of making the dictionary because, like most of the new lexicon, it's supported by money, media and the mania for anything that ends with a dot com.
Part skateboard culture, part CBD bred, part HTML, the language of the new economy is creating a boom for linguistics and lexicologists. Sites, books, papers and consultancies are struggling to document what Macquarie University academic Donna Gibbs describes as the most rapid burst of creativity in the English language since Chaucer. The lexicon is scaling up not just to describe the burgeoning functions of the internet, but the new relationships it is building, the new forms of capitalism that accompanies it and the systems and societies it recreates.
The Next generation is branding the language of the future. And this is creating problems for old-economy thinkers. Long before the lexicologists get there, cyber language acts as an instrument of business a device that identifies those who have the bandwidth for the job (i.e. capabilities) and those who are a bit yesterday.
Les Fallick, director of Gresham Private Equity Fund and former economics professor, says listening to the language of the new economy is like eavesdropping on teenage children's conversations.
"It's the language of Wayne's World and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's derived from the skateboarding culture so it's economical, direct, and agrammatical in that it dispenses with connecting words. Like 17-year-old boys, it's in a hurry."
But terms like "lock-up", "fee-gouging", "shootouts", "10-bagger", "bondage", "froth", "exit strategies", "the head's up" and "skin in the game" are not just slang.
"Like all street language it's got a subversive component and the young entrepreneurs use it to tell how flat-footed we are."
The use of language to identify and then exclude outsiders operates the same way that "the Australia Club members use Latin jokes", according to Fallick.
And the protocol is just as stiff. The first rule being, don't ask. If the person across the table is struggling with a term, "you don't stop and disentangle it for them. "The more discomfort the better, because in a cut-throat business any angle you can get is useful."
Jon Peters remembers squirming when he first heard the expression "lives touched". He was in a meeting with a venture capitalist in the US, making a pitch for kgrind, the youth entertainment network. He was doing well until the VC asked him how many lives kgrind touched in a week.
"I had to ask. You don't like asking but I had to and it's now one of my favorite expressions because it's a more meaningful description than any alternative."
The term is an evolution of the expression "hits", one of the first terms to describe visitors to a site. Terms like "unique visitors" and "eyeballs" attempted to further define the meaning but both still fail to capture internet activity.
Peters says, "Every new term shows people coming into a new understanding of the business. 'Lives touched' takes it further because it doesn't just refer to internet [visits] but to total people exposed to your brand through events, other media, promotions etc."
Andrew Jarrett, founder of Red Sheriff, an internet audience monitor, agrees that "if a couple of phrases draw blank looks in a meeting you might switch to old economy words, but also you start to wonder whether they're going to add value.
"Language is part of the way we do business. The dot com world has a language of its own mostly because we're moving so fast it's good to succinct [sic] things down."
The dynamism of the new language is typified by the expression "clicks 'n' mortar" (also "clicks 'n' bricks" and "bricks 'n' clicks"), which was first coined by Charles Schwab chief David Pottruck last year to describe his company's "high-tech and high-touch approach".
Since then, the term, which means a company with both old and new economy features, has been used widely in the media and has a good chance of moving out of jargon sites and into dictionaries.
According to an academic who sits on the editorial board for The Macquarie Dictionary, the new economy culture will be just as successful infiltrating the dictionary as in usurping the economy.
An associate professor of linguistics at Macquarie University, Pam Peters, says: "The question is whether these words can escape those technical areas and move into the general language.
"You'd expect many to do just that because they are associated with winners rather than losers; they have newness on their side; social prestige; they can easily be associated with other areas and these groups work directly with the media, the internet, so they have better ways of spreading the words."
There's also an incentive to learn words that can make you a lot of money. Asked if he uses the expression "triple-digit returns" or "double comma incomes", Gresham associate Tom Tucker replies, "I'd like to."
Even when the Nasdaq dives, the language doesn't lose energy, it just changes direction. The expression "moonshot", which describes shares that soared after their IPO, has now been joined by the term "mudshot". The adaptability of English, the speed of internet communication and the globalisation of commerce all act as power generations for linguistic creativity. But such fluidity also causes confusion.
According to the site Jargon Scout, the expression "dot communist" was first used by Sumner Redstone in a speech to US broadcasters in April. It refers to employees of companies who have equity as well as salaries and, therefore, under Karl Marx's definition, own the means of production ie, they are communists.
However, within a month the term was been widely misused, with Australia and US media using the expression to refer to Chinese who use the internet for e-commerce.
The publisher of The Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler, says casualty rates for new words are always high, but especially in the current genre. "It is very fluid. Where people are trying to label things, you find some expressions will win and some won't, but the rate of change today is phenomenal.
"Look at the word 'new economy'. It's difficult to decide what it means because people are using it in different ways. It's identified more by its symptoms, ie globalisation and changing work practices, than by its root." Last time The Macquarie Dictionary was updated (in 1997) the number of new words (4,129) was boosted by early technology words such as cyberchick, infotainment and netiquette. Butler suspects in the next edition there will be a greater number of words added because technology/commerce/cyber culture words comprise about 50 per cent of the submissions made to the editorial meetings.
The energy of the language is the quality that most struck Macquarie University's Donna Gibbs when she compiled the book Cyberlines with Kerri-Lee Krause. "It ranges from the most functional of uses to expressions that are used almost like jewellery but they all have these qualities of inventiveness and wit and irreverence and a brash confidence. "But that's not surprising because the whole of the creative society's energies are there behind them.
"The internet always does things faster, bigger and broader and it's doing the same for language. When you think of how slowly language has changed in the 700 years since Chaucer, then you look at what the internet is doing, it's like looking through a high-speed camera." For those who feel they're being spammed by the jargonauts or are a bit too inculcated in a Latin-based language, there are a few clues to picking up meanings of new words.
According to Gibbs, many are familiar terms that have been transferred across to the virtual world, ie bookmarking, mailbox and traffic. Others have a physical appearance, ie mouse or portal; and others have emotional associations, like flaming.
But, Gibbs points out, the metaphoric roots of the language are as broad as the internet landscape. It borrows from the urban environment (traffic, silo); from the office (mailbox, bulletin board); home (homepage, cookie, trash); sexuality (hot plugging); violence (crash, hit, flame, abort); leisure (suiTing, browsing); disease (virus, deadly embrace); animals (mouse, bugs) and machines (search engines).
Some expressions even relate to the old economy. Andrew Jarrett says one of the hottest expressions around town is "cash is king". When I commented that the expression is ages old, Jarrett replied, "Yes, it's been around for at least four or five weeks now."
Lexicon of Recent Hot Words