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Twitterisms

March 22, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

What do you call a user of the Twitter short messaging service who is liked and admired by other users?

A tweetheart! And how do you use the term? Here is an example of how Belgian tennis player, Kim Clijsters, used it in a tweet from the Yahoo-Eurosport site: “Happy Australia day to all my Aussie tweethearts!” It earned her the Tweet of the Day.

I am not a Twitter user, or tweeter, but the terminology of Twitter has been the subject of many conversations. While this social media has been emerging at an incredible pace, some of the terminology around it is quite well developed. The glossary provided by the Twitter service contains the basics. But it doesn’t list all the good (and bad) terms that have sprung up around the service.

Some of the terms that don’t work so well are impossible to pronounce. The list in this article on About.com contains designations, like Twitpocalypse, which is defined as “the moment when the identification number of individual tweets surpassed the capacity of the most common data type. The Twitpocalypse crashed a number of Twitter clients.” The motivation behind the name is clear, though.

This article* in the quarterly webzine of the Macmillan English Dictionaries, MED Magazine, has a very nice list of twitterisms. I would consider most of them quite well-motivated. If you don’t want to check out the link, here is another example: What group do people belong to whose tweets attract a large number of readers? The twitterati.

*BIK: Unfortunately this article was removed recently.

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More on good terms

March 8, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

I have been traveling quite a bit in the last few weeks and while that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to write, it allows me to watch out for well-motivated and poorly-motivated terms.

Here is one that several German terminologists approved of the other day at a meeting in Styria. The house in the picture on the left was designed by architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and is called Augenschlitzhaus (literally translated: “eye slit house”). The picture on the right shows the model and several of the houses, which are built into the earth. One look at the house and we understood why they were called Augenschlitzhaus.

I also saw a good example of what I would consider a poorly-motivated term. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture. But you are probably all familiar with candles that have a fragrance, some are obnoxious, some are pleasant. They are referred to as fragranced candles. And then industry invented something called defragranced candle. When you look at the term it makes you think that a candle was produced, fragrance was added in the process and then removed again. I am not an expert in candle making, but that is the image I got when I read the term. It distracted me enough that I didn’t buy the candle.

Can you think of terms that worked really well or didn’t work? Feel free to share them.

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A home run is a home run is a home run?

February 20, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

Indeed. Except if it has been “determinologized.” If terminologization is when a common everyday word turns into a technical term, then the reverse process is when a technical term from a technical subject field becomes part of our everyday vernacular. The process was identified, analyzed and, I believe, named by Ingrid Meyer and Kristen Mackintosh in a paper in Terminology in 2000.

They describe two categories of determinologization.

1. The term retains essentially the same meaning, but is no longer used by subject matter experts referring to a concept in their field. Rather the subject matter might have become popularized, and laypersons understand enough about the concept to use the term. The term in the layman’s use refers to a “more shallow” meaning of the concept or one that also has other connotations.

Good examples are medical terms of diseases that are prevalent enough for all of us to have an idea about them. Insomnia, for instance, is a condition that for medical professionals is highly complex.

They might break it down into sleep maintenance insomnia, sleep-onset insomnia, etc. and treated it with benzodiazepines. It might be chronic or intermittent, familial or even fatal.

At some point, we all might have talked about it in a less medical sense. Here is the entry in the Urban Dictionary—a listing on this website is a good indication that a term has become a word in common usage. And to the right is an excerpt from the South African Mail&Guardian about a chess player who can’t sleep before competitions.

In these examples, the meaning behind the word “insomnia” remains the same as in the medical context: Someone can’t sleep. But our associations don’t take us to the clinical setting, rather we get a sense of the mood of the sufferer or the chosen cure.

2. The word now describes a completely different concept. While it shares some characteristics with the meaning in the technical subject of the term, it does no longer share the essential characteristics.

The Monday-morning quarterback is not a John Elway or Peyton Manning rising on the first workday of the week. It is the guy who watched them the day before and now tells his buddies how the quarterback could have done a better job or how anyone could have done a better job in any subject matter. The essence of the concept in sports, i.e. an American football player, is completely gone in this general use of “quarterback.”

A term from another sport, baseball, which has been determinologized, is home run. The excerpt from the Wall Street Journal shows that when someone hits a home run, there is no batter involved, not even a hit in the sport’s sense. But it is “a success.”

Enough baseball terminology has made it into the American vernacular that Dr. Jerry Roth at Sprachen- und Dolmetscher Institut in Munich gave it a special focus during our studies. He even had us meet in Englischer Garten for a game.

Why do we care? Well, if we create new terms, borrow them from other fields or languages, terminologize or determinologize them, the receiver of our message—and that does include translators in many cases—only understands it if our usage has the appropriate level of precision. Understanding the methods that we have to our avail allows us to choose the best methods. The likelihood that others will understand our message then is much higher. And after all, understanding is what communication is about.

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