The Hindu Business Line : Serving up new tech soup

To survive in the twenty-first century, you need to dip into some of the new words that the dynamic English language keeps adding to its stock. Let’s start with A. Do you know that ‘al desko’ means ‘while sitting at your desk’ — the way most people tend to spend their lunchtime too?

A recommended al desko activity can be the reading of Kerry Maxwell’s Brave New Words ( www.landmarkonthenet.com), where you’d find in B, ‘blog’ — the online journal, with no word limits in cyberspace. But why blog? Because, as ProgressiveU.org observed, “In the back of each blogger’s mind lurks that desire for someone to look into a blog of theirs and find an intellectual, witty, interesting person…”

More practically, and hurting physically, B is for ‘BlackBerry thumb,’ the latest in repetitive strain injuries. If like many other owners of a BlackBerry hand-held device, you send as many as 500 e-mails a day, then be careful, you could start to suffer from thumb soreness, cautions the author.

In C, catch up with ‘citizen journalist,’ a new tribe that is armed with digital camera and weblog software. “Well before professional camera crews and photo journalists arrive on the scene, ordinary people with video cameras and camera phones can provide instantaneous footage of events. These are the citizen journalists, people who use digital technology and Web-based media to share what they witness with a worldwide audience,” explains Maxwell.

“Like your mobile phone or the grass in your back garden, English is continually changing, shrinking and growing back again, constantly acquiring new characteristics,” he warns you in the introduction.

“Many of these changes occur as a direct response to the way we live. As the world changes, we need to find different ways of describing it, to fill the gaps in our vocabulary for new concepts, and to ditch those words that refer to ideas no longer relevant to us.”

The majority of new words cleverly exploit the building blocks already present in English, using regular patterns of creativity, finds Maxwell. For instance, ‘text message’ and ‘mobile phone’ are examples of how something new is described by combining two words. In a different league are words such as window, mouse, virus, surf and net, which are new ways of using words that already exist.

Continuing the alphabetic journey, you’ll learn that: DWY is ‘the 21st century crime of driving while yakking (into a phone)’; ego-surfing is the looking for occurrences of your name on the Web; fat finger syndrome can be costly when ordering online; grafedia are ‘underlined bits of text written, chalked and spray-painted in public places’; hyperdaters ‘use the Internet to set up as many as ten dates per week, sometimes two or three in one night’; infomania is a new and widespread addiction that you could be suffering from ‘if you regularly send a quick text message while talking to someone, or frequently check your e-mails during your working day’; QWERTY phenomenon is ‘the general tendency we have to stick with something familiar despite the potential for far more efficient alternatives’; spIM ‘attacks users through instant messaging services, making advertisements and unwanted messages automatically appear when you are connected to the Internet’; technology butlers attend to your technical needs, offering help with ‘Internet access, personal e-mail, international use of mobile phones, conference calls or voltage conversion… no job too small for the cyber concierge’; and yottabyte of YB is a ‘lotta’ bytes, more precisely, 10 to the power 24.

Fun read.

No straight lines

Life. Love. Two tough words, to many, often too tough to decipher, but Advaita Kala has a simple interpretation, in Almost Single ( www.harpercollins.co.in).

“For most people, life and love are like a game of connect-the-dots: the numbers always form a straight line to the goal. The result is a perfect picture. For the lesser half — especially for those who inhabit my world — the vision is a blur of blots and splotches and there’s no straight line to speak of.”

Aisha Bhatia, the novel’s heroine, who narrates her story as a first-person account, is 29-years old and single. “Did I say single? Well, I do have one ‘serious’ ex-boyfriend,” she confesses. “We are now ‘friends’ and the split was ‘amicable’. So why the inverted commas? Because break-ups are always tricky.”

Her friend Misha, who is also on the wrong side of 29, has one and only ambition — ‘to net the perfect NRI.’ And she discovers a quick way to find the right match from among ‘the rapidly depleting reserve of single and eligible men over thirty.’ Her idea is to register with a matrimonial portal — ‘the one-stop site for an NRI to hold tight’.

“So, we logged on and spent the next forty-five minutes thinking up glowing adjectives to describe our assets and ambivalent ones to dodge the iffy bits,” Aisha recounts.

“‘Hike up your annual income by a couple of lakhs, it’ll keep the broke types away,’ Misha suggested. So I fudged my salary, and then I fudged my weight and body type. The fudging was addictive, like a drug you couldn’t get enough of.”

After some Photoshop work, their pictures were also up on the Net, and the man of their dreams was ‘just a click away.’ Wait… Aisha wants to ask Shastriji, her astrologer, whose number is first on her speed dial. “Do you see marriage in my future?” she asks him. “Well, your stars are changing,” he replies. “Lagna yog starts on the 21st of this month. This time is very auspicious for marital alliances.”

Shastriji is a computer whiz, and he has it all on his PC, Aisha knows. “So, do you see me getting married soon?” she asks, getting straight to the point. Alas, you can push a PC only to a point. Shastriji mumbles, “Ummm… the time is auspicious… so let’s see… there are indications.”

Therefore, the opening chapter titled ‘My world’ closes with a fuming Aisha, who writes: “Shastriji is also the artful dodger; he never commits to anything. I think that’s what keeps me going back. I can never say for certain that he was wrong about something. There are always ‘indications.’”

A book that can engagingly give you company over a weekend brunch.

Tailpiece

“To me, marriage is a lot like a computer game.”

“Lots of fun, you mean?”

“Not exactly, considering that I have to start all over again after the game comes to an end too fast, even when my scores are still low.”

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