jjoensuu wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> first of all, apologies if this posting does not exactly match the
> subject of the discussion group. I was a bit clueless as to which
> group to post this question to.
>
> I am looking for information (books, etc) on the subject of "creating
> a vocabulary on something on which no vocabulary as of yet exists".
> With "something" I am here referring to e.g. a new technology,
> process, or a set of ideas in the mind which cannot be unambiguously
> described with a currently existing vocabulary.
>
> In other words, this is about the creation of a vocabulary for
> communication of new ideas in a natural language.
>
> I am mainly interested of a conceptual framework or a set of best
> practices for the process of developing a vocabulary, if anything like
> that exists. Alternatively, do***entation on the history and/or
> problems encountered when attempting to communicate new ideas would be
> useful.
>
> Any direction in this would be appreciated.
>
> thanks in advance,
>
> JJ
>
You mean the old way or the new way?
Rough outline of the old way, which generally took from several years to
several decades to execute:
1. Person thinks up new idea and uses existing language, with metaphoric
extensions as needed, to describe it, publishes paper or book or just
writes about it to his buddies in L'Académie or the Society of Whatever.
2. Competitor, just weeks or months behind, publishes, using somewhat
different words to describe the same phenomenon or idea.
3. Printers rifle through existing symbols and dingbats to find a unique
way to express the subject symbolically without cutting new punches,
work something out with the author.
4. Ideas become the talk of the literati and people in the field start
teaching the idea to their university cl*****. Most students founder,
but some struggle through the original language and grab hold of the idea.
5. Such a student publishes a more elegant expression of the
idea--shorter, punchier, cleaner--using words and phrases of his own
coinage.
6. Others recognize the improvement and incor****ate it into their own
textbooks.
7. The topic filters down to the secondary school level, with textbook
writers and editors further compressing and simplifying. The
best-written, most memorable versions survive in the oral tradition and
get added to the language.
Rough outline of the new way, which generally takes six weeks to three
months:
1. Engineer who hasn't been seen since he was hired, because he works
from home and that's okay with everyone because he dresses funny and
smells bad, emails his boss with a schematic/flowchart/link to a working
prototype/whatever of a brilliant new gizmo. Email is full of its/it's
confusion and other signs of not paying attention in English class.
2. Supervisor stares at the email for a few minutes, recognizes that
there might indeed be something of value there, asks a project manager
he knows to do a little skunk works testing to see if the thing is
feasible to make and if a focus group, presented with it, thinks they
might buy it.
3. Supervisor, after a positive re****t from the subterranean testing,
screws up his courage and adds it to his monthly re****t to management.
4. Management assigns it to marketing to figure out whether they can
sell it.
5. Bunch of marcomm types sit around a conference table while one person
writes shouted words on the whiteboard.
6. Head of marketing looks at the list, picks the three words she
shouted and erases the rest.
7. New vocabulary is laced through every news release, product
datasheet, user manual, financial re****t, and advertisement the company
issues over the next year.
8. Technology re****ter who can't distinguish cor****ate PR spin from news
re****ts on the new idea using the company's vocabulary. If the product
catches on in the market, the public uses that vocabulary, too.
Dick Margulis, with tongue only partly in cheek
http://ampersandvirgule.blogspot.com/
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