Word: verb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Japanese officials and negotiators at higher levels, most of it is spent talking past each other." Japanese diplomats make the mistake of believing that if they can explain their policy often or well enough, the U.S. will ultimately agree with it. Part of the problem is semantic: the Japanese verb rikai means both to understand and to appreciate. While the two concepts are often blurred in Japan, in the U.S. they...
Despite the absorption of foreign words, however, the Japanese language developed in a society that was hierarchical and isolated, that avoided controversy and valued subtlety. Even today the language still requires sharp differentiations-different vocabularies, different verb endings-among various levels of polite speech and familiar speech. Some believe that the language is inherently and purposely vague, while others see something more subtle. "Japanese can be made vague," says Paul Anderer, who teaches Japanese literature at Columbia University, "but the language is extraordinarily precise in determining who you are as you speak to someone else about what it is that...
Other words that already exist outside the computer world have been given crisp new meanings. "Vanilla," for example, is now synonymous with ordinary. "Garbage collection" has been shortened to G.C. and turned into a euphemistic verb: "I'm going to G.C. my desk." "Rape" has broadened to mean violence to a program...
...have long since entered the wider language. So have software and hardware. The human brain in some circles is now referred to as wetware. When a computer goes down, of course, it crashes. Menu, meaning a computer's directory of functions, is turning up now as noun and verb, as in "Let me menu my schedule and I'll get back to you about lunch...
...Hacker's Dictionary, one finds gronk (a verb that means to become unusable, as in "the monitor gronked"), gweep (one who spends unusually long periods of time hacking), cuspy (anything that is exceptionally good or performs its functions exceptionally well), dink (to modify in some small way so as to produce large or catastrophic results), bag biter (equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently) and deadlock (a situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for the other to do something. This is the electronic equivalent of gridlock, a lovely, virtually perfect word...