Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Jargon Creep

I'm both a librarian and a gamer.  I suppose I was technically a gamer first, but given my slightly compulsive organizational habits and, well, compulsive helpfulness (ask a question and see if I can try not to find you an answer), librarian may have been inevitable once I had the requisite schooling.

Both areas are fairly steeped in jargon.  Raid, weed, stack: all common words that have enough of a jargony twist that when you're talking about the gaming or library usage, they cause confusion if thrown into general conversation.  Some samples I find creeping into my general vocabulary:
  • Weeding.  If I mention to someone outside the profession that we're weeding at the library, it almost inevitably causes confusion.  It's really pretty straightforward - just instead of removing undesirable plants, we're removing books that, for some reason, no longer fit in our collection.  The material could be outdated, the book could be in poor physical shape, or the library's purpose may have evolved such that it's no longer relevant to the patrons.  For example, if our college drops a major, we'll probably have items in the collection that are no longer going to get used.
  • Raiding.  People unfamiliar with MMO (massively-multiplayer online) games can have a hard time grasping the idea of raiding.  The general concept is the same as what peoples have done for centuries - grouped up to go attack something.  But in a gaming context, if the person's point of reference is, say, Pong, it may be hard to understand.  Raiding is a group of people in a game getting together to go assault an enemy stronghold.  In World of Warcraft, that generally means monsters controlled by the game, but there's also player-versus-player scenarios that use the same kind of group.
  • WTB/WTS.  These tend to drift into my social networking posts (Twitter, Facebook, G+); they're shorthand for "want to buy" and "want to sell".  "WTS cold, PST" is shorthand for "Want to sell cold, please send tell."  ("Tell" is the inline command for a private message in many games.)  Translation: "Anyone want my cold?"  "WTB A/C" may have crept into my updates sometime this summer (I don't remember), but "Want to buy air conditioning" did apply to most of the summer here at the library.
  • Everything related to maintaining order in a book collection: stacks, shelf-reading, shifting, and so forth.  Stacks are the collection of shelves; shelf-reading is making sure the books are in order; shifting means moving a section of books, generally to better distribute them on the available shelving.
  • Library of Congress call numbers.  So many people only know the Dewey Decimal System (if they understand classification at all) that mentioning book subjects by their LC number doesn't really get me anywhere.  The P's, the S's, the T's - literature, agriculture, technology.  The only reason my home collection is in Dewey and not LC is because my collection isn't big enough to need LC's granularity.
  • Fumble.  Fumble probably came into gaming from football (dropped the ball), but in Dungeons & Dragons, if you roll a 1 on a 20-sided die in a situation where a 1 is the worst possible roll, that's a fumble.  It means you not only failed in what you were trying to do, but you also botched the job so badly you probably hurt yourself in the process.  Normally this only applies to attack rolls and saving throws.  If you tried to play darts and the dart somehow ended up in your leg instead of the dart board, you fumbled.  If the situation in which the failure occurred wasn't a saving throw/attack roll kind of situation, however, you're more likely to have...
  • Failed a spot check.  That pen you're looking for that you can't find that's sitting on the desk in front of you?  Yeah, you failed a spot check.  Fell off your deck?  Failed a balance check.  (If you hurt yourself when you fell off the deck, you possibly fumbled your reflex save.)  Skill checks can't be fumbled (you can actually succeed on a 1 if you have enough skill points invested in the one you're trying to use), but failing them can have disastrous results (especially if climbing or swimming are involved).  I generally notice deer along the side of the road at night; my husband doesn't.  Guess who has a higher spot check?
  • /commands.  World of Warcraft's in-game command-line input is preceded by a / - so /dance makes your character dance; /hug will display the hug echo (generally "X needs a hug!" or "X hugs Y." depending on whether you have someone targeted).  You can actually do combat via the command line if you can type fast and know the commands.  (Occasional interface bugs have led me to chain-typing /cast Steady Shot for my hunter.)  But while most people #hashtag on Twitter, I compulsively /command - so instead of #hungry it's /hungry.  I really need to get out of the habit if I want to jump on the hashtag bandwagon.  (When people post bad days on Facebook or whatnot, I'm more likely to /hug than *hugs* - especially on G+ where the asterisks make the word bold.)  If you don't play WoW, though, the / may be unfamiliar.  In a way, this is similar to when I was still playing on the MUD regularly, and I would compulsively type in my gossip macro de jour (gg or gos usually) when replying to people in AIM.  I still occasionally "fbs" if I'm sitting at the keyboard thinking; that was the macro I made for "fill bottle spring" on the MUD, where you had to actively make your character eat and drink, or you'd starve/die of thirst.  If you ran out of water while you were out in the world, you'd have to go find some, so I got into the habit of filling my bottle every time I returned to the town square (also known as Recall...).
There are others, of course, but these are ones I've noticed slipping into everyday usage.  A lot of the library jargon I try to catch myself and talk around as I'm talking to someone, because things like OCLC, consortial borrowing, LVIS, and whatnot are sometimes easier to just use other words to start instead of trying to explain them in full.  (LVIS is said like Elvis, but is not Elvis, for example.)

Unfortunately I sometimes forget just which words are library jargon, and which are the ones the patrons use to describe something.  OPAC?  Catalog?  At least with a lot of gaming jargon, the origin is more obvious to me.  It's more concerning when words that shouldn't be jargon confuse our students: journal, article, volume, and issue should not be foreign words to them (or at least not to the native speakers of English), but unfortunately sometimes seem to be.  That's where the compulsion to help people learn comes into play.

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