Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
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By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
L'nivenal Press Syndicate
Most high schools today require their graduates to have taken a foreign language. What language are young people learning today? They’re learning to talk computers.
Technically speaking, computerese isn’t a language. It’s a jargon. One of the definitions of jargon is “unintelligible talk or writing; gibberish; babble,” and to the uninitiated that’s exactly what it sounds like.
One characteristic of jargon is that it takes familiar words and adapts them to unfamiliar meanings. Something that is floppy is loose and limber; a disk is something circular. In computerese a floppy disk is a solid square.
Thumbing through a Macintosh manual, I learned about icons, but these icons are not Christian paintings or sculptures. Computerese gives us menus, buttons, bits and defragmentation. We find windows, including layered windows. “A color graphic with 16 colors per pixel requires four bits to represent each pixel.” Yes. -
These days a popular pastime for masters of computerese is to surf the Internet. Lexicographers are lagging far behind the high school students. None of my dictionaries lists “Internet,” and all of them define “to surf’ only as riding the waves on a
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