Speaking in Tongues
By Amit Asaravala, Executive Editor
When it comes to words, the computer industry has always been exceptionally frugal. What else could explain the bizarre fondness for acronyms? We have learned to cope with this phenomenon, mentally expanding and contracting letters as we communicate with colleagues, and occasionally coining a TLA or two of our own. Once in awhile, one of these economy-sized terms will be worth twice its value—as with Active Server Pages and Application Service Providers—causing us to pause briefly to think about context. But other than that small break in our daily cycles, we've grown accustomed to our new, thrifty idiom. We think nothing of our ISP granting us FTP and POP access via DSL. We develop clients and servers that rely on HTTP over TCP/IP, and we get angry when the DNS is down. And we are even willing to accept that, upon Microsoft's insistence, DNA stands for Distributed Internet Architecture.
Such is the language of our work.
The truth is, our industry is not cheap—just lazy. And this laziness does not stop with acronyms. Somewhere along the line, it was deemed too cumbersome to pronounce each letter in SQL. Hence, sequel was born. GIF became giff (or jiff) and GUI turned gooey. WWW is now dub-dub-dub. WAP was always wap and everyone knows that JPEG is jay-peg and MPEG is em-peg. But does anyone remember when JAVA lost its case and morphed into Java? I don't, but I know when PERL became Perl, and that it apparently rhymes with URL. And TCL is Tcl, which sounds like tickle. Worst of all, I once heard HTML pronounced as hit-mel.
