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Words matter a great deal to me - for several reasons. Most obviously because I write for a living, less obviously to an innocent observer because reading is my favourite pastime and because being an editor gives me some control over the words that others employ. Because I've written a dictionary, I must be a member of that shadowy institution some call the "word police", but if so I'd protest that I'm a very liberal policeman. I'm more interested in slang, jargon and other forms of technical, marginal and subversive language than in maintaining any orthodoxies.

As an example, I've been fascinated in recent years by the way mainstream words get turned into slang by truncation. You can clip a word at either end, but from which end it actually happens seems to be subject to fashion. In the 1960s, slang words were made mostly by chopping tails off - as in "porn" from pornography or "vibe" from vibration.

Nowadays, however, yoots truncate words by chopping their heads off, for example "za" for pizza, "shrooms" for mushrooms and "blog" for weblog. So a permanent sea change of slangification modes? No sir, because if you look back to Victorian times you'll find "bus" from omnibus and "phone" from telephone - head-chopped just as today.

I was approached early on by the makers of the BBC's Balderdash & Piffle TV programme about a quotation connected to "cool" in a book I co-wrote, and was encouraged that they wanted to show viewers the process by which words are accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary (which, in this country, is the ultimate stamp of authority). However, I was quite disappointed by the series that finally emerged: almost a game show with celeb presenters on treasure hunt-style quests. It concentrated solely on earliest recorded usage rather than on evidence for widespread usage, and the entry for "cool" was particularly poor.

Word

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usage affects my job editing PC Pro's RWC (Real World Computing) section, whenever significant new jargon terms are coined and we have to decide when to incorporate them into the magazine's house style. The latest major example was the term Wi-Fi, which all our Real World contributors resisted for several years, preferring to refer to it by the IEEE standard number 802.11b (as it then was). This was partly because, being techies, they like to call things by their proper name, partly because of the slightly tabloid, populist ring to it, and, after 2003, probably because Wi-Fi became a brand name of the Wi-Fi Alliance. To show what a sloppy sort of policeman I am, my suggestion to adopt the term was voted down at several contributors' meetings, until sometime around 2005 it entered public parlance to the point where it was appearing in newspapers and on the TV news, and RWC contributors started to use it spontaneously. That's how language works, by evolution and consensus rather than by decree.

Currently, I'm involved with another change in word usage, although I realise that my hopes of success are about the same as a Coke can's chance of halting a steamroller. This time it isn't a brand name or an abbreviation but an attempt to change the identity of a whole profession. I'm talking about the substitution of the word "developer" for the word "programmer" to describe a person who writes computer programs. This change has been creeping in gradually during the past three years or so, and has now reached the point where all RWC contributors prefer the word developer.

This time, it's me who's been resisting the change. My main problem is that the associated verb "develop" is vague and ambiguous, as is the noun development, which can just mean any event or happening: neither term is as precise as program or code and, as a result, long passages dotted with these three D-words may leave a reader unsure whether code is being written or things are just happening. I also have more aesthetic objections. To me, "developer" has two unpleasant connotations: a smelly liquid that you pour into dishes in a darkroom, or a smug and well-fed gentleman in an astrakhan-collared overcoat who buys nice old pubs and turns them into bijou flatlets. On the other hand, I associate "programmer" with Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, an honourable and semi-scientific profession.