The-Word-That-Should-Not-Be-Named
Software Development magazine has announced the finalist list for the 16th Annual Jolt Awards, (yes, sponsored by the soda) recognizing “significant” work in the production or creation of software, and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability is nominated in the general category. Publishing the book in September 2005, O’Reilly promoted it as “thought-provoking,” which is appropriate. I was provoked. By Morville’s repeated use of The (Buzz)Word-That-Should-Not-Be-Named.
Overall, Morville’s text is a useful overview of trendy concepts in navigability and The Word appears more toward the end, when Morville is leaning heavily on explanation rather than theorization. Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent Web 3.0 article in A List Apart mocked The Word in the article’s summary; “Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005.” And there it is, “intertwingled”. I prefer the gerund, especially as in this case it would emphasize the long, dangling tail.
Intertwingularity was coined by Ted Nelson, now supposedly at work on ZigZag. From lovely parents “intertwine” and “intermingle” (the former recalling plaited ivy scaling brick and the latter a line from the third chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,”) descends “intertwingle”, a grating Neil Diamondish term that has been used to describe a way to Google your email, any application that plays well with others, the title to Morville’s fourth chapter and the key word in the antepenultimate sentence of the book; “A brilliant intertwingling of atoms, bits, push, pull, social, semantic, mind, and body, where what we find changes who we become.” Ugh.
In keeping with O’Reilly tradition, this book’s cover features an animal; here, a lemur has been chosen to represent. As Jason Santa Maria notes in the latest installment of Under The Loupe, design convention dictates the most important information dominate the top left position. The least important information is exactly the opposite. Rosalyn Lum commented that “O’Reilly was the big winner,” in last year’s Jolt Awards. And there was that song by Joel on Mystery Science Theater 3000 called “Joey the Lemur” that went something like this: Joey the Lemur: “Please consider me as a possible corporate symbol or mascot suitable and fine for any professional or semi-professional sport team.” How about an emblem? Lemurs = enduring emblems of, say, enduringness, of anything but an illustration of That Word.
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Original lemur image (Ring-tailed): Smithsonian National Zoological Park
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Posted Thursday, January 26th, 2006, 12:57 pm | Filed in Books, Design. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
