If one is seriously interested in the computer as a metaphor for the human condition--which is, more or less, what this volume purports to be about--I would recommend instead Turing’s man [1], a brilliant study of “defining technologies” that, unaccountably, Barry never mentions. On the other hand, here is a popular, laugh-provoking, readable, largely anecdotal survey of the excesses of computerese, written by a Silicon Valley magazine editor, glottophile, and amateur etymologist, who has somehow kept his sanity while overdosing on technobabble, especially as spoken by the marketers and PR people of the computer industry.

Read this book if you want to impress and baffle your friends and colleagues with the earliest (1950s) and latest jargon. Indeed, the world of computers could be a case history of language run amuck. Barry recounts it all: the lack of standardization, the bad puns, the polysemes, the neologisms, the buzzwords, the acronyms and abbreviations, the portmanteau words, the eponyms, the anthropomorphisms, the solecisms, the euphemisms, the obfuscations, the logorrhea, the hyperbole, the redundancies, the oxymora, as well as practices for which no names exist, such as “izification,” turning nouns into verbs, turning verbs into nouns, and using acronyms as verbs. In addition, one chapter is devoted to the religious, sexual, pharmacological, thanatological, and other connotations of technobabble.

While some attention is given to etymology, it is not--to Barry’s credit--presented as holy writ. Indeed, one particularly amusing chapter on the putative origins of some of the industry’s favorite terms is entitled “Apocrypha and Folklore.” Here you will find brief but stimulating discussions of “unixsyllables” (“biff,” “grep,” and so on), “bug,” product names, “glitch,” “kludge,” “nerd,” “RISC,” and  “Winchester.” 

As the use of computers spreads beyond the professional and hacker community, for which technobabble is the means of communication and thus very much a necessity, the question arises whether its effect on the language at large is benign or pernicious. Barry disapproves of technobabble

when it is employed to hoodwink, mislead, or obfuscate… [but, more generally,] technobabble has truly enriched and enlivened the American language. …[Further,] the American language has no institution like the French Academy to “protect” it and maintain its purity. American English has always opened its arms to welcome vocabulary associated with new phenomena, and the computer revolution is just such a phenomenon (pp. 174–176).

Who could argue with those sentiments?