Short: Listening Like a Conlanger at Work

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George talks about some interesting terms he encountered in his most recent job, and how you can pay attention to language around you at work for inspiration.

Original Script

Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley.

Today, I want to continue my occasional “listen like a conlanger” series talking about how you can think like a conlanger at work. Language is everywhere at the workplace, and by having language on your mind as you work, you may be able to improve your craft and distract yourself from the drudgery of capitalism.

Conlangery is entirely funded by our patrons on Patreon. To make a monthly contribution, go to patreon.com/conlangery. Patrons get access to early episodes and get to see these shorts scripts as I am working on them. I’m also considering what other kinds of perks I can add, so if you have suggestions, let me know.

Some of you may know that I was working at Google as a transcriptionist for the past two years. Now that that contract has ended, I want to talk a little bit about my experience there. I know that many people bemoan corporate language, but the way people around you talk at your job can be an interesting thing to think about. There can be a lot of jargon floating around with unusual and interesting origins, and it can reveal something about the subculture that exists within the company.

I’d like to start by talking about a few of the metaphors I encountered at Google. Many of these are likely common at other tech companies and throughout the business world, but I find them interesting.

First, there are metaphors that seem to be related to the technology business. It’s common for people to ask for a high-level summary of some system or process. High-level here means a surface-level or abstract and simplified explanation. As far as I can tell, this seems to be related to terminology for programming languages.

A high-level programming language is designed to be easier for a human programmer by giving abstracted options that are closer to how we understand the program, taking care of the technical aspects under the hood. Python is a good example of a high-level language. Conversely, a low-level programming language, like Assembly, is much closer to the detailed instructions, down to managing the computer’s memory within the code.

So it makes sense that these would end up getting extended to things like an explanation. Ultimately, high-level and low-level are related to the cognitive metaphor of DEPTH IS DETAIL, which you see in phrases like in depth and deep dive. It’s interesting to me, as these terms seem to conflict with other English height metaphors that relate to hierarchy. It’s entirely plausible that a high-level meeting will have two very different meanings: either a meeting of people who are in high positions in their company, organization, or government, or a meeting where topics are covered in a broad and general way. I expect that both apply simultaneously a lot of the time, since powerful people don’t have time for details, but they could clash.

Another technology metaphor I heard was bandwidth. Most of us are familiar with the computer networking sense of bandwidth, where it refers to the capacity of a connection to carry data. Apparently this has caught on in the business world to mean someone’s ability to complete tasks. In an environment where people are expected to be juggling multiple tasks at once, this metaphor is useful. We might criticize that environment for the stress that it causes, of course, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another podcast.

In both of these, I can think of a couple of things to ask about your conlang. First is what kind of technology is common in your world? Many languages have farming metaphors, because until very recently, most people were farmers to some degree. There are also car metaphors, and now, information technology metaphors are becoming common. Second, what kind of things do your speakers work with all the time? This is especially good if you want to mention specific subcultures within certain professions. Alchemists might make chemical metaphors. Astronomers might take to star metaphors.

Another term related to the business is Dogfood, which refers to internal testing where employees are opted into features that are still under development. I see competing origins for this online leading to different companies, but the phrase “Eating your own dogfood” seems to be involved, in a sense of using your own products, which may have originated with actual dogfood companies. Google’s internal material indicated the term was used because it’s a dog-friendly company — employees are encouraged to bring their dogs to work — but I’m pretty sure that this didn’t start with them. Nevertheless, there’s actually an interesting extension here, as an even earlier development testing stage is called Fishfood, which is a more limited pool of opted-in employees.

What interests me here is the complexity. A common saying catches on in the business world, then inspires a technical term with possible reinforcement from the company’s culture, then another extension is added on by slapping a different animal metaphor on. That kind of chain reaction is hard to think of in a conlang, especially if you’re going word by word, but can happen fairly often in natural languages.

I really wish I could give examples of internal codenames, but I’m really uncertain about whether I can mention those. Most of the ones that I know are for internal data products or backend data systems, and I don’t think they’re publicly known. I will just say that there are a variety of names: some are pop culture references, some are generic and descriptive, and some of them, I’m not sure what the name came from.

And of course, there was a plethora of technical terminology. As a transcriptionist, it wasn’t really my job to understand that beyond what was necessary to put the right word in. Occasionally there were interesting little things that can pop up. For instance, the database query language spelled as SQL (for Structured Query Language) was usually pronounced as “sequel”, which is apparently the most common everywhere, though there were those who pronounced the letters S Q L out, especially non-native speakers. If you think about it, it’s clear how dependent that kind of situation is on particulars of our culture. It requires a highly literate culture with an alphabetic script using initialisms. How would this sort of thing work differently under an abjad? Or an abugida?

I don’t have one overarching lesson here, except to say that this is another case of using the world around you as inspiration. Think about terminology you come across at work, what its origins are, and how it connects to work culture. How might different professional or work environments in your conworld contribute to the terminology there? For instance, I still need to come up with some technical terminology for magic and magical universities in my current conworlding project, and I’m going to have to think about these things before I come up with finalized terms. I know that different cultures will view these things differently, but I’m going to have to sort out where those differences are.