OSCON 2007: A Lexicon for Open Source, by r0ml
r0ml (or Robert Lefkowitz for those who don’t know him) is an entertaining speaker who tangents off often and brings in ideas and influences from outside programmers’ typical sphere of interest.
r0ml says that “software is the Trivium of the XXI century.” Rhetoric is the art of communicating through simbols & ideas about reality. Now, the language used by IT vendors in communicating with business intelligence is unclear. This means that there’s a problem with language. The problem is that we don’t know what business intelligence is. We have this habit of rubbing two words together and assert that it means something different.
We should do what the masters do: hang a word off an idea. Invent a word for an idea instead of smooshing two (or more) words together. Then r0ml had an idea: some people (maybe most people) don’t know what incunabula means. It’s the Latin word for cradle, and it refers to books published before 1501. But since nobody knows what it means, we can repurpose it into something that means something completely different.
Aha! What we need to do is find words that were perfectly good words hundreds of years ago and nobody remembers what they mean, but they sound good so we can reuse them! There are plenty of places you can go that very few people these days care about: rhetoric, illuminated manuscripts, heraldry, and fencing are great places to mine for these great words. These are “lexicon frameworks — Words On Rails.”
r0ml’s done this by taking over semasiology: if you search for it all you get is r0ml (or at least you used to — he’s number four now).
“Perl is like the Charles Dickens of the programming world. Perl is literature, of course it’s hard to read!”
r0ml’s goal is to get rid of acronyms: replace GUI with “epideictics”, which means “fit for display”.
There’s a word called “stemma”, which is the reconstruction of the set of changes of a document over time. Sound like version control?
It turns out that there’s an amazing correlation between technical terms used in the early days of publishing, especially for illuminated manuscripts, and the software world.
We need a word for open source, and r0ml modestly proposes “chrysography”, the writing in letters of gold. The alternative is “decretal”, which sounds worse and means papal decree giving an opinion on a point of law.
There’s actually a better replacement for “free as in speech”: “liberal”. “Liberal studies are called this because they render man free,” therefore open source programming should be considered a liberal art.
Of course, “liberal” has been branded these days to mean something different, but r0ml doesn’t want to hear people come to these conferences and say “there’s no English word derived from Latin that means ‘free as in speech’ but not ‘free as in beer’.” So stop saying that!
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