AT 71 SHOULD I NEED TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE

OK bear with me, one more post before I return to Japan and our time spent there. This piece is an opinion, now very solid in my mind. It is one, that I have heard voiced by people from the past. I never thought much about it until I started this blog. Yet in two short weeks it has risen to the top of my opinion charts (top 100). It is my Opinion that at 71, or at any time after middle age, a person should not have to learn a new language. Only, in order to use today’s technology, by that I mean a computer. It fits somewhat in with my rant of the other day regarding the language now being developed in financial circles. The one they use now, to keep me from knowing what is happening to my investments.

However at this time it is only an opinion and has not yet reached the level of a full on rant. My reasoning goes like this. Call me old fashioned or close minded but we do have lots of words in the English language. All have been time tested to describe anything with which to live our lives now or in the past. The Webster Dictionary, now gathering dust in the garage is 3 inches thick with tightly spaced tiny font words. Thousands of them! These words have served us for all time. Do we really need a new language to make computing even more difficult than it actually is?

I am two weeks into my new blog and have, in these two weeks, learned many words and terms that I had never heard in my life. If ,by luck, the word was found in the English dictionary, today. Any meaning that is now applied to the word is completely different and unrelated to the meanings described in the book. It not only complicates the learning or use of my computer. But it brings me to the point of giving up and looking elsewhere for a new challenge. One, at least, that I don’t have learn a new language. Learning how to turn (that infernal machine) on and get the lights blinking is as deep as I need to go.

A few examples of this, are simple words. But completely foreign to people without a lot of exposure to the modern technology (there I just did it, why couldn’t I just say computers). Words that crop up like; URL, domain, sub-domain, link, hyper-link, perma-link, plugins, widgets, peer, hierarchy, dashboard backend, zone file, imap, ipop, Ipv6 host, DNS propagation, dashboard, default mail category, search engine, static page, Pingbacks and trackbacks, avatars, metadata and on and on. This list I culled from one page of my course today. It makes my head spin. I had to read each page two or three times. Then try to translate it into English in order to understand it.

Some of the words and terms I encountered applied to content and features of my blog that I had stumbled upon and had made up my own names for at the time. I now have foreign words for these things and cannot even hope to remember them for tomorrow. In short I am under the opinion that if we don’t put a halt on this abuse and misuse of the English language, many of us will not be able to speak or understand what is going on in today’s conversations, for much longer. What say you?