Alice Through the Magnetooptical, Electrooptical Looking Glass JOHN H. WlLSON Atlantic Research Corporation, Alexandria, Virginia
IT
IS an old saw, of course, that a medical man buries his mistakes and an editor publishes his. For the job of editing involves dealing with a rapidly changing language. The technical editor must manipulate it to guarantee clear, precise scientific communication. In any editorial office handling technical or scientific manuscripts this change in the language is a perpetual headache, challenge, and amusement. What, for example, do you do with magnetooptical or electrooptical? One word? Hyphenated? What the technical editor is often inclined to do, but is forbidden by the rules of the game, is to toss his problems-and their authors, the linguists, the handbook and dictionary makersout the window. The student of language watches the language change, but he does not have to do anything about it. Not only does the technical editor have to do something about the language, he has often t o make decisions about aspects that as an easy-going student of language he never thought about. With a technical editor, for instance, hyphens assume outlandish proportions. Within several days of my first coming to work as a neophyte technical editor, one of the subjects discussed a t a staff meeting was hyphenation. I was asked: "What are your views on hyphens?" What were my views on hyphens?! I didn't think anything about hyphens; I had no views on hyphens whatsoever. I had never spent over two minutes total on hyphens in my life. But in the ensuing years I have spent and continue to spend considerable time on hyphens. For hyphens are in many cases to the technical editor what the micrometer is to the expert machinist-it is his means of achieving the desired precision. The technical editor not only has to do something about the changing language, but he has to go out on a limb because nobody can tell him the answer he needs. He is working in the forefront of language change where he has to analyze the trends, make his decisions, and publish them. Thus he has the reward of getting in his twecents' worth in shaping current language, specifically in this case American English. And he
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EDITOR'SNOTE: We apologize for the mundane label which relegates the author's choioe to the status of a subtitle. This was due partly to help ahseneminded college profeswra who will he ronnnlting the index in future years, and partly hecause editors always have to change somelhing. Regardless of its label, this delightful essay should be required reading for any who think an editor's life is a dull one.
VOLUME 34, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER, 1957
lives in perpetual jeopardy of being damned as a false prophet if his prognostications-published, printed, and distributed for all to see-prove to be far off the mark as the language shapes up, three, five, or ten years hence. In the fullest sense of the word the technical editor and writer is "engineering" English. He has to shape his materials to fit his communication problem, relying on theory and background where they will apply, but relying on his experience and professional judgment in the final analysis. The language to a technical editor is the instrument by which modern technical and scientific theory and practice make themselves known. New concepts require new words, new combinations of words, new grammatical constructions. A technical editor's daily problems involve such weighty and genuinely important matters as expressing a revolutionary new concept-a mathematical expression, for example, that has suddenly come to life in the labor* tory and must be embodied in some other means of expression than a few mathematical symbols; or he must decide such semisilly matters as whether pseudounimolecular is one word, or should it be pseudo-unimolecular? If he decides on the solid form, since Webster's tends to set prefixes tight, does he then want to go along with electrooptical and magnetooptical rather than electro-optical and magneto-optical? Of such tremendosities and trifles are a technical editor's life compounded. PULLING THE RABBIT OUT OF THE HAT
The speed with which the English language today adapts itself to changing conditions is astounding. It is accepted as a truism that this change in language reflects, of course, the galloping change taking place in our daily lives. Since ours is a technical and scientific civilization, many of our basic similes and metaphors, our figures of speech, can be expected to have an increasingly technical and scientific bias. The increasing rate a t which scientific and technical terms become a part of the nontechnical vocabulary is accepted with scarcely a raised eyebrow. Popular a,pplication of technical terms is seldom pastel. Thus, to short-circuit, or to cmnplex; spontaneous combustion for love at first sight; a young lady may possess high octane or a radioactive personality; a rumor run wild is a chain reaction; a universal solvent is a panacea; atomize is used for pulverize; spectrum for gamut; such weirdies as oiltightness are perennial.
Perhaps never since Shakespeare and the sixteenth century has the English language been subjected to such rapid and colorful change. What is the similarity between the axteenth century and the present? i n both cases new worlds were opening up. Then it was a world of discovery, geographically, culturally, and scientifically. Today it is the wholesale applicatiori of science that is year by year, and almost month by month, changing daily lives, activities, and thoughts. This is particularly true for the engineer and the scientist, and therefore for technical writing. Undeniably, technical writing is creative writing in the most exacting sense. A new expression, like a new mathematical equation, like a new computer, is an importa,nt invention for better or for worse. Its clarity and conciseness may lead on to further clarification and discovery-or it may in the long run lead up a blind alley. COINAGE: STERLING OR COUNTERFEIT?
Intriguing certainly are questions of word coinage that spring up. Was the word really invented, or was it just picked up a ready-made tapered peg to fill a hole in the dike? Take, for example, two current entries in the race for permanency: cybernetics and automation. Cybernetics seems pretty clear cut; Norbert Weiner invented it, coined it, pulled it from the Greek, so Oxford Universal Dictionary claims, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Automation is something else again. OUD dates it as originating in 1610, and as extending its meaning gradually to where it can very easily be stretched to cover the superautomatic electronized procedures meant by the word today. Time magazine, however, in its issue of March 19, 1956, a t the beginning of a special spread on automation, gives credit t o Ford Executive Vice-president Delmar S. Harder for coining the word eight years ago[Harder] "first described the automatic transfer of auto parts from one metal-working machine to the next." Prohably what happened here is "coinage" of a word that already existed ready to he applied-the readymade tapered plug for the dike. There is a perpetual problem with shop talk and technical jargon: when should it be allowed formal status in written reports? Much of the work of the technical editor, much of the climbing out on a limb that he does, is in legitimizing or denyiug legitimization to shop talk and jargon. I n many cases, naturally, there are perfcct,ly good standard forms for words, expressions, and unusual grammatical usages. But in a substantial minority of cases the shop talk has created or applied a word, adapted an expression, or welded a new grammatical construction that can only be gotten around with cumbrous circumlocutions. The technical and scientific usage is at first merely convenient; because of its aptness it takes'hold; and once it has appeared written a few times is on its way to either temporary or permanent adoption and continued adaptation until it is finally canonized by acceptance for the dictionary. Along with this general trend from shop talk to canonization in the dictionary, there are certain areas of technical language that are in perpetual change. New and changed concepts and expressions lead to new abbreviations and symbols which must be systematized.
Some of the standard elements of language change are evident, such as nouns becoming verbs, verbs becoming nouns, and both verbs and nouns springing from adjectives. Special words are perpetually arising to cause investigation, discussion, and decision. If, for instance, you think zero is nothing, you have never had to deal with zeroing i n , zero axial, zero-best reception, zerodimensional coordinates, or zero-length, or zero-lift, or zero sight line, or zero time circuit. Proper and Trade Names. Unlike old soldiers, old scientists and technicians, as well as industrial concerns, may die but they never quite fade away; for they are embalmed, entombed, and forever commemorated in the trade names they have left behind, or in names bequeathed to the language. So long as the company continues to exist and produce a product to which it has attached a copyrighted name, that name must be capitalized. Thus Fiberglas, Plexiglas, Pyrex, Kodak, Vaseline, Carborundum, or Slcellysolve B. However, fiberglas, pyrex, uaselim come in manuscripts with machine gun rapidity, along with bakelike, cellophane, celluloid, celotex. Should a trade name slip through lower case, on the assumptiou that it has hecome a general term, a common noun rather than a proper noun, a polite but firm letter is likely to be received from the manufacturer pointing out that this is a copyrighted designation and as such must be capitalized. Company names or nicknames become a part of current technicalese. Thus: 3M (Minnesota Mining and Ma,nufacturing), K & E (Keuffel and Esser), Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America), GE (General Electric). Many great names in technology and science are, of course, commemorated in familiar words whose acceptance into the language is marked by their lack of capitalization. Thus: volt, watt, ampere, ohm, henry, babbitt metal, bessemer steel, bunsen burner, diesel engine. Others are yet in the process: Erlenmeyer flask, V e w turi tube. No time limit can he set for a term borrowed from a name to become lower case; some are uncapped from the outset, some many never go to lower case. Those which are used most will tend to drop the capital soonest! COMPOUNDING OR CONFOUNDING
New or relatively little-used compounds of letters and words, or of one word with another are perpetually cropping up, the form of which must he decided in line with current trends-assuming a trend can be estahlished. Take a t random these examples: A-bmnb; acid-fanning, acid proof; acute-angle, acute-angled, acuteangular; air bubble, air duct, airfilter, air pump, hut airplane, airfoil, airglow; to break down, to stand by, but to planepolarize, to field-test, to heattreat; and wave form, wave number, wave surface, but wanelength. These can be found a t various times, in various publications, in various forms. General rules are risky, subject to perennial contradiction, hut necessary if any attempt a t reasonable editing is to be made. Letters followed by a closely associated word generally take a hyphen. That much can be stated boldly. But when it comes to setting up rules for when two words (1) stay two words, ( 2 ) are hyphenated, or (:3) become one word as noun, verb, or adjective, then any meaningful, genuinely useful rule runs head-on into usage which us-
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
ually refuses point blank to conform. Some properly hyphenated words will go solid despite best efforts to keep them forced apart (overall for what you wear, over-all for the adjective). Unit Modifier. I n cases where compounding words to form an adjective can change meaning, the concept of the unit modifier has arisen. I t is well exemplified in half baked chicken versus half-baked chicken and in half dead horse versus halj-dead horse, or in one thousand pound lots versus onn-thousand-pound lots. The concept carries over into measurements used as adjectives: 2.0-inch rocket, 5-second intervals, 3i1/~degreeelevation. Prefixes. Prefixes are set tight. This is the general rule observed by most technicd publishing houses and by Webster's, and the rule is broken only on the frequent occasions when it needs to he. As Korzyhski points out, there is an appreciable difference between nonsense and non-sense. Infrared and ultraviolet are firmly established as one word though they are still cropping up hyphenated. These are one word: subsonic, supersonic, ultrasonic, and even ultrasupersonic. So too is nonionized one word, and has nothing to do with pungent odors. Self as a prefrw remains hyphenated. Deviation from the one word rule is allowed on occasion where two vowels fall together, thus de-energize. But generally the rule holds: semiautomatic, semiaircooled, and even semiinfinite; preeminent, preigrzite, preaccelerate, preamplijy. What about no%self-luminous, semimicro-Soxhlet extractor, and the old friends electrooptical and magnetooptical? ENTER THE MAD HATTER
There are some forms that are not going to he hanished despite herculean efforts; they are taken from the vernacular and will force their way into better company in formal writing. Two examples are the adverbial use of due to and the dangling participle. The Journal of the American Chemical Society pamphlet to its abstractors and editors in regards dangling modifiers pleads: "Please stop using 'using' in this way." Causal use of due to appears so often in some manuscripts that it is not worth the candle t o comb them out. These things have a point of diminishing return, even for the highest quality technical publishing. The ideal process that conventional language development theory would give a technical term is somewhat as follows: A new type camera is developed, and because of the appearance of the final item is dubbed the Gooney Bird. (This is a name attached to a camera developed a t a Naval Ordnance Test Station.) We can then talk of the Gooney Bird type of camera, then the Gooney Bird principle, then the gooney bird camera, then just simply the gooney bird, and eventually the verb to gooney bird. But what the process may actually he is anybody's guess. Whether these forms will develop or not who can say for sure? How long before an abbreviation becomes a symhol-if it ever does? Will datum go by the boards and data ,
VOLUME 34, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER, 1957
be used for both singular and plural? A hundred years from now we may have the answers to all these questions. But the editor needs the answers right now. Spelling. Simplified spelling makes hut small inroads. Sulphur has become sulfur, hut don't try it with phosphorus. There is a good deal of rmtroversy over the retaining or dropping of the final e in some chemical terms: glycerine or glycerin (and what in either case of nitroglycerin?); hydroxide of hydroxid; chlorine or chlorin; bromide or bromid? (See Mencken, "The American Language," 1947, p. 401, item 9.) Funk and Wagnalls leaped on the simplified, or at least e-less version, either trying to create a trend or rashly anticipating, because as yet Webster's and the e's have it. Current naptha for naphtha is laid to the influence of Fels-Naptha. (See Mencken, p. 407, note.) Few Britishisms intrude; if you find aluminium it is likely to he only a typographical error. Passive to Active. There is a tendency, particularly in chemical writing, toward such expressions as the substance analyzed for such and such a percentage of that of the other, rather than the substance was analyzed for such and such. I t is as if the substances were doing the analyzing for themselves. Nothing gives a better indication of the outward orientation of the scientist and technical man; he is in his thinking giving to this material that he is working with a life of its own. He becomes more or less a passive bystander while it performs its magic, almost without his doing anything. The extensive use of the passive in technical writing probably accounts for the unavoidable use in many cases of the dangling participle. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
To conclude: Need today is for a language with a precision it has never before needed, so never possessed. Acceleration of scientific work in particular and life in general means that English (at least American English) must change faster than it has ever before, and that it will in the future probably be forced t o change faster even than it is now. Much of the new terminology and usage must be metaphoric, hyperbolic, slangy--creative. At the same time, scientific and engineering attitude carries to language a consciousness of need for design, for tailoring to use. Never was a language precise yet clear, accurate but flowing, exact hut provocative, more needed. Never was language called upon for more rapid adaptation to the conditions under which it exists and, by what is currently known as "feedback," t o shape those conditions. Not only to Alice, but to the student of language and technology, no less than to the technical edltor, current American English is showing us life through the electrooptical, magnetooptical looking glass. And in this glass we see ourselves reflected with a minimum amount of distortion-if the technical editor and writer is doing his job.
