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REBEKAH A. MCNEILL Birmingham, Mich...
Such unwieldy compounds, McNeill says, constitute 19% of all the words in written NASA reports-substantially more than he found, for example, in papers by psychologists (8%) or in articles by educators (3%). But they are also used extensively by non-space scientists, "apparently to meet the common need for technical terms in greater numbers than metaphors, metonyms or neologisms can supply...
Most of the remaining space jargon, according to McNeill's analysis, is made up of "nominal compounds"-words strung together endlessly in what scientists consider a logical order to describe complex devices or systems. Controlling the attitude of a ship by ejecting gas through nozzles, for instance, is called "nozzle gas ejection ship attitude control." The longest nominal compound discovered by McNeill appeared in the Congressional Record, and sounded as if it had been translated literally from the German: "liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen rocket powered single stage to orbit reversible boost system...
Possessive Pretension. On the other hand, McNeill stresses, the compound is often used to extremes, especially by those who pretend to possess a degree of technical knowledge that they do not have. Establishing a "pretension index" based on the length of nominal compounds and their frequency of use, he discovered that in their speeches, members of Congress were even more compound-conscious than NASA engineers. A space-technology magazine was a worse offender. It printed 300% more six-word compounds than did written NASA reports...
More detailed study of space-age jargon would be beneficial, McNeill feels, and his report must be considered only preliminary. "But we can conclude," he says, "that the following statement is probably true: Space-speak is an engineering technology concept expression manuscript sentence grammar device...