CYBER-LINGO; TECHSPEAK RESHAPES HOW WE COMMUNICATE.

Byline: Deborah Claymon Knight Ridder News Service

The shower is Geoffrey Nunberg's sanctuary from technobabble. There, all he hears is the sound of his own reverberating voice as he croons his favorite country songs.

Everywhere else, he is the ultimate eavesdropper. A Stanford University linguist and principal scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Nunberg is constantly attuned to the cacophony of new words reshaping the English language. And in the Bay Area - where conversations are riddled with jargon from high technology and the Internet - the buzz is more like a roar.

``It is no more necessary to go in search of new words in a cafe in San Francisco or Palo Alto than it is to seek out secondhand smoke in a cafe in Paris,'' Nunberg said. ``It's in the air and simply bounces from table to table.''

The vibrant pace of innovation - and the pressing urge to be an insider - spills over from the technology industry into our everyday speech, here more than anywhere. As a result, it has become commonplace for ordinary people to use tech terms like ``vaporware'' to refer to an outrageous boast or ``multitasking'' to describe the sticky situation of having two love interests.

Living in San Francisco, Nunberg said, he can track the metamorphosis of English by walking down his block. ``Have you heard anyone use the word `double-click' as the equivalent of the verb `emphasize'?'' he asked with a shudder. ``I really hope that one doesn't catch on.''

Technology's influence on the language is not simply a local phenomenon.

High tech bombards English with new vocabulary and new uses of old words, as well as modifying the way we communicate, from sending an informal quip in an e-mail message to instantly publishing our views on the World Wide Web.

Consider ``chat-fly,'' the equivalent of a barfly in a chat room, and ``Deadfish, Idaho,'' a fictitious location that serves as a hypothetical test market for mainstream America's response to consumer technologies. Both are ranked as favorites on the Ultimate Silicon Valley Slang Web site (www.sabram.com/site/slang.html) created by Steve Sabram, a software designer from Campbell.

The antithesis of a dictionary, Sabram's slang site is built on the authority of voluntary submissions and published in an instant, illustrating the power of technology to both create and spread new words.

This kind of viral transmission is part of the natural evolution of language, experts say, a process that has survived similar onslaughts from such technological advances as railroads and rocketry. Think of metaphors like ``full steam ahead'' and ``going ballistic.''

But perhaps more than ever, modifying language has become a ``bottom-up, not top-down'' process, said linguist Nunberg.

Professional word-watchers used to sit in their offices in Oxford, England, or Boston and wait for new words to appear in print before identifying them as part of the official vernacular. But with more rapid forms of written communication, such as e-mail, technology is its own best messenger, giving new words an easy route into the mainstream from what were once only fringe conversations.

Tech talk has certainly inspired some duds. Think of all the acronyms that stream by in the average radio commercial selling computers. But it also has expanded our imaginations. Remember when you first heard the word ``mouse'' and it didn't refer to a rodent?

Traditional lexicographers, the people who create dictionaries, are beginning to be more open to such rapid change. The American Heritage Dictionary is considering including in its next edition more than 300 new words from computer science. And the Oxford English Dictionary, widely accepted as the authority on the etymology of English, ranks high technology as one of three or four main sources of new words, ``and likely to be the most obvious,'' said Frank Abate, editor in chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

Words for social customs on the Internet show particularly creative coinage, said Joe Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. ``Spam,'' once known as a processed lunch meat, is junk e-mail, which violates ``Netiquette,'' the unwritten rules of behavior online, formulated by the ``digerati,'' the intellectual elite of cyberspace.

SILICON VALLEY SLANG

A few examples of Silicon Valley slang that are rapidly changing the American vernacular:

Bit stream: A bit stream is a contiguous sequence of bits, representing a stream of data, transmitted continuously over a communications path. Can also refer to a person's stream of consciousness or their mental capacity.

Chat-fly: Also known as a cyber-barfly. Someone who hangs out in online chat rooms schmoozing seductively with strangers, ideally under the cloak of anonymity.

Cookie: A cookie is information that a Web site puts on your hard disk, enabling the site to remember your preferences the next time you visit. It enhances your access to the site, but it keeps you under tabs.

Deadfish, Idaho: A fictional hick town in the American heartland considered the worst place in the world to sell high-tech products. Not many folks are Web surfing or telecommuting from this apocryphal test market.

Digerati: A combination of digital and literati; the intellectual elite of the Internet age. These are the people who attach dot.coms to their names and clean up on IPOs.

Megaflop: A measure of a computer's speed, expressed as 1 million floating point operations per second. Or a really bad first date between software engineers.

Netiquette: The grafting of network and etiquette. Netiquette is the unwritten code for civil behavior on the Internet.

Spam: Notorious as a canned meat product (short for seasoned pork and ham), spam has been adopted by Internet culture to mean unsolicited or junk e-mail. It's not considered good netiquette to send spam.

Worm: A worm is a type of virus or replicative code that slithers into a computer system to a place where it can do harm. In today's wired workplace, a worm is also the slimy guy in the neighboring cubicle who insinuates himself in the organization through sycophantic behavior.

SOURCE: Whatis.com, Ultimate Silicon Valley Slang Page and Mercury News

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