The World of Computer Words and Computer Languages
Programmers have long needed special vocabulary to talk about their lines of code, and some of this has now spilled over into everyday speech. For example, radio and television presenters commonly add e-addresses when telling listeners and viewers how they might write in to a program, using ‘at’, ‘dot’,and ‘forward slash’to punctuate their utterance. ‘Dot com’is now a commonly heard phrase, as well as appearing in writing in all kinds of advertising and promotional material.
In fact, written English shows developments well beyond the stage of the literal use ‘of .com’. This suffix is one of several domain names (with some US/UK variation) showing what kind of organization an electronic address belongs to: the earliest set included ‘.com’(commercial), ‘.edu’or ‘.ac’(educational), ‘.gov’(governmental), ‘.mil’(military), ‘.net’(network organizations), and ‘.org’or ‘.co’(everything else). ‘Dotcom’ has come to be used as a general adjective (with or without the period, and sometimes hyphenated), as in ‘dotcom organizations’and ‘dotcom crisis’. It has, however, come to be used in a variety of ludic ways, especially in those varieties where language play is a dominant motif – newspaper headlines and advertising. It has been expanded into other words: a computer hardware store advertises itself as ‘SHOPNAME.computer’.
Similarly, ‘www’became ‘web without worry’in a British Telecom advertising campaign. The similarity of ‘com’to ‘come’has been noticed, and doubtless there are similar links made in other languages. An offer to win a car on the Internet is headed ‘.com and get it’. A headline in the ‘Independent Graduate’on openings still available on the Web is headed: ‘Dot.com all ye faithful’.A phonetic similarity motivated a food-outlet advertisement: ‘[email protected]’.The ‘dot’ element is now introduced into all kinds of phrases: ‘Learnhow.to’and ‘launch.anything’, are names of sites. The phrase ‘un.complicated’introduced an ad for personal finance. One company uses the slogan ‘Get around the www.orld’;another has the slogan ‘www.alk this way’.
Asimilar ludic trend applies to the symbol @, now the universal link between recipient and address. It was chosen pragmatically by a computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first network e-mail in 1972. He needed a character which did not occur in names, and this typewriter keyboard symbol stood out, with the bonus of having an appropriate meaning (of someone being ‘at’ somewhere). A subsequent irony is that many firms and organizations have replaced the letter ‘a’ or ‘at’in their name by an @: @llgood, ©fractions, @cafe, @Home, @pex. And it has been seen turning up in other settings where traditionally the word ‘at’would be used: ‘Thisis where it’s @’is one slogan; Bill Gates’ 1999 book is called ‘Business @ the speed of thought’, and an academic article concludes a review of the interaction between literary and everyday language through the device ‘language @ literature’and ‘literature @ language’. It has even been added to text where the word ‘at’would not normally appear – a postcard to David Crystal’s house read: ‘Crystals @...’followed by the address.
By now the e-prefix must have been used in hundreds of expressions. ‘The Oxford Dictionary of New Words’had already noted ‘e-text’, ‘e-zine’, ‘e-cash’,and ‘e-money’and on and on. Examples since noted include ‘e-tailing’and ‘e-tailers’(‘retailing on the Internet’), ‘e-lance’(‘electronic free-lance’) and ‘e-lancers’, ‘e-therapy’and ‘e-therapists’, ‘e-management’and ‘e-managers’, ‘e-government’, ‘e-bandwagon’, ‘e-books’, ‘e-conferences’, ‘e-voting’, ‘e-loan’, ‘e-newsletters’, ‘e-security’, ‘e-cards’, ‘e-pinions’, ‘e-shop’, ‘e-list’, ‘e-rage’, ‘e-crap’and (Spanish) ‘e-mocion’.
In a newspaper article headed “I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language”, John Humphrys argued that texters are “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.” In the picture: a teenager texting on a mobile phone.
As a new variety of language, texting has been condemned as “textese”, “slanguage”, a “digital virus”. According to John Sutherland of University College London, it is “bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrink talk ... Linguistically it’s all pig’s ear ... it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.”
People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that it ceases to be intelligible. When messages are longer, containing more information, the amount of standard orthography increases. Many texters alter just the grammatical words (such as “you” and “be”). As older and more conservative language users have begun to text, an even more standardised style has appeared. Some texters refuse to depart at all from traditional orthography. And conventional spelling and punctuation is the norm when institutions send out information messages, as in this university text to students: “Weather Alert! No classes today due to snow storm”, or in the texts which radio listeners are invited to send in to programs. These institutional messages now form the majority of texts in cyberspace – and several organisations forbid the use of abbreviations, knowing that many readers will not understand them. Bad textiquette.
Natural-language programming is known as the process of writing programs using a computer language which is very similar to a natural human language in software engineering.
The only language a PC can directly execute is machine code which consists of 1s and 0s. The language is difficult to write, so use symbolic languages that are easier to understand. Assembly languages are low-level computer languages that use mnemonics rather than only numbers making it easier than machine code for humans to read and write. For example, they use abbreviations such as ADD, SUB, MPY to represent instructions. The program then is translated into machine code by software called an assembler. There are also procedural languages that enable programs to be written using sections of code known as procedures. Each procedure performs a specific task.
Programming is known as a process of writing a program (a set of instructions which a computer uses to do a specific task) using a computer language. Both machine code and assembly languages are called low-level languages because they are closer to the hardware. High-level languages, however, are closer to human languages: they use forms resembling English which makes programming easier. The program is translated into machine code by software known as a compiler. There even happen to be a language processor – a software that performs computer language translation.
In computing there are general-purpose languages for writing different types of programs. Here are just some of them to be defined for a kind of impression what a computer language can be like.
FORTRAN (Formula Translator) is oriented towards manipulating formulas for scientific, mathematical, engineering problem-solving applications. It is characterized as a high-level computing language that was designed by scientists in 1954.
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is popular for business applications. It is a high-level computer programming language, the principle transaction processing language used to process the records of large organisations on mainframe computers.
BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a simple level computer language often used for teaching programming. Visual BASIC is a general-purpose programming language with a graphical interface. It is particularly suitable for use by beginners learning how to program. It is now used to create Windows applications.
Pascal is a high-level structured computer language named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal, often used in college computing courses to teach programming.
A general purpose computer programming language is C. Originally, it was designed for writing Unix systems programs, system software, graphics and commercial software. Furthermore, an object-oriented superset of the C programming language is C++ which is commonly used for writing applications programs for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Java is designed to run on the Web. It is an object-oriented computer programming language that was developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1990s. Programs written in Java can be used on a wide range of operating systems. It is widely used for developing interactive applications for the Internet. Java applets are small programs that run automatically on web pages and let you watch animated characters and play music and games.
A smiley face – often called a smiley or emoticon – is used in text message and online chat communications to convey an emotion. Smiley faces are used in the same way that a person’s voice or facial expression changes when having a face-to-face conversation with someone. For example, if you were joking with someone and send a text message saying GAL (meaning get a life) the person receiving your message might think you are texting a rude comment.
To create a smiley face you use standard keyboard characters and punctuation marks in sequences that look like facial expressions might. When viewing text smiley faces, they are all sideways. Here are some basics to get you started in understanding what the different characters used in smiley faces mean:
§ The close bracket represents a sideways smile )
§ Add in the colon and you have sideways eyes :
§ Put them together to make a smiley face :)
§ Use the dash - to add a nose :-)
§ Change the colon to a semi-colon ;and you have a winking face ;) with a nose ;-)
§ Put a zero 0 (halo) on top and now you have a winking, smiling angel 0;) with a nose 0;-)
§ Use the letter 8 in place of the colon for sunglasses 8-)
Some chat and instant message programs will automatically translate text smiley faces into graphical emoticons. In AOL Instant messenger (AIM), for example, if you type out the characters to make a “happy face” followed by “sad face” followed by “cool sunglasses” you would enter the following characters:
:) :( 8-)
Once you’ve entered the text in to your AIM chat window and hit enter to send the text message, AIM converts the text face to a graphic face (emoticons) if it can recognize the smiley pattern. What you see on the screen in your AIM chat window will look like this:
This is how the emoticons would appear in your AIM chat window:
Here are few examples of different smiley faces and their meanings. You can send any number of text faces or text images to help you convey an emotion when you text message or online text chat with people.
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As with any new social medium, there is an entire vocabulary that users of the Twitter service adopt.
Twitter is a free microblog, or social messaging tool that lets people stay connected through brief text message updates – up to 140 characters in length. Twitter is based on you answering the question what are you doing? You can post thoughts, observations and goings-on during the day in answer to that question. Your update can be posted on your Twitter profile page through SMS text messaging, the Twitter Web site, instant messaging, RSS, e-mail or through other social applications and sites, such as Facebook.
As with any new social medium, there is an entire vocabulary of slang words and abbreviations that users of the Twitter service adopt. Many of the new Twitter lingo describes the collection of people who use the service, while other abbreviations are used to describe specific functions and features of the service itself (like the Twitter abbreviation RT. Also, there are a number of terms which are basically Twitter shorthand: abbreviations that users include in their tweets.
Here are definitions to more than 130 Twitter abbreviations, words, phrases, and tools that are associated with the Twitter microblogging service – our collection of the best twerminology (Twitter terminology):
@reply: The @reply means a Twitter update (a tweet) that is directed to another user in reply to their update. An @reply will be saved in the use’s “Replies” tab. Replies are sent either by clicking the ‘reply’ icon next to an update or typing @ username message (e.g., @user I saw that movie too).
ab/abt: Short for “about.” This chat abbreviation is frequently seen on Twitter.
attwicted: Slang term used to describe someone who is addicted to Twitter.
b/c: Twitter shorthand for “because.”
B: Twitter shorthand for “be.”
b4: Twitter shorthand for “before.”
BFN: Short for “bye for now.”
cld: Twitter shorthand for “could.”
clk: Twitter shorthand for “click.”
cre8: Often seen on Twitter, it means “create.”
da: Often used on Twitter, this is a shortened version of “the.”
detweet: Slang term used to describe a tweet you made, then deleted.
EM / eml: Shorthand versions of “e-mail” routinely used on Twitter.
EMA: An acronym for “e-mail address” used on Twitter.
emergaTweet: Also known as emergetweet it refers to a tweet sent out during an emergency when 911 is unavailable.
F2F: An acronym used on Twitter that means “face to face.”
HAND: An acronym often used on Twitter, it stands for “have a nice day.”
IC: Often used on Twitter, it is the shorthand version for “I see.”
idk: An abbreviated form of “I don’t know” frequently used on Twitter.
mistweet: Slang term used to describe a tweet that you later regret having sent.
neweeter: A slang term used to describe a new tweeter.
NTS: Twitter shorthand for Short for “note to self.”
OH: Short for overheard. This chat abbreviation is used on Twitter, often in place of RT (retweet) when the user does not want to provide the username of the follower they are quoting.
PRT: Short for please retweet. This is a notation added to the end of a Tweet. PRT shows the user is asking others to retweet their post.
TMB: Short for “Tweet me back.”
tweetaholic: The term used to describe someone who has a problematic addiction to Twitter.
tweeter: Refers to a person who send tweets on the Twitter service (same as Twitterer).
twerminology: A slang term meaning “Twitter terminology.”
twettiquette: Short for Twitter etiquette. It is a slang term used to describe acceptable Twitter behavior.
Twewbie: Short for Twitter newbie. It is a slang term used to describe someone who is new to Twitter.
U: This shorthand form of “you” is frequently found on Twitter.
woz: Slang for “was,” this term is frequently found on Twitter.
wtv: A shorthand form of “whatever” often found on Twitter.
ykyat: An acronym standing for “you know you’re addicted to...” that is frequently used on Twitter.
yoyo: An acronym that stands for “you’re on your own” that is often used on Twitter.
ztwitt: A slang term that means “to tweet extremely fast.”
If you have ever received a text message or text-based online chat message that seemed to be written in a foreign language. The popularity and rise in real-time text-based communications, such as Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, e-mail, Internet and online gaming services, chat rooms, discussion boards and mobile phone text messaging (SMS), came the emergence of a new language tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media.
While it does seem incredible that there are thousands of chat and text message abbreviations, remember that different chat abbreviations are used by different groups of people when communicating online. Some of the following chat abbreviations may be familiar to you, while others may be foreign because they are used by a group of people with different online interests and hobbies than your own. For example, people playing online games are likely to use chat abbreviations that are different than those used by someone running a financial blog updating their Twitter status.
| ? | I have a question |
| ? | I don’t understand what you mean |
| ?4U | I have a question for you |
| ;S | Gentle warning, like “Hmm? What did you say?” |
| ^^ | Meaning “read line” or “message above” |
| <3 | Meaning “sideways heart” (love, friendship) |
| <3 | Meaning “broken heart” |
| <33 | Meaning “heart or love” (more 3s is a bigger heart) |
| @TEOTD | At the end of the day |
| .02 | My (or your) two cents worth |
| 1TG | Meaning number of balls needed for win (online gaming/Bingo) |
| One-to-one (private chat initiation) | |
| Leet, meaning ‘elite’ | |
| I love you | |
| I love you too | |
| 14AA | One for all, and all for one |
| I hate you | |
| Zero hand (online gaming) | |
| 10X | Thanks |
| 10Q | Thank you |
| 1CE | Once |
| 1DR | I wonder |
| 1NAM | One in a million |