Weak and Lazy Language Describing Smartphones
We use incredibly weak language around smartphones and point-n-click computer interfaces. It’s embarrassing.
Here’s some of the egregious words commonly used to describe how to interact with a smartphone. The unifying problem is not defining words clearly.
Tap
The single worst offense is tap.
Early on, talking about smartphones used “click”, borrowed from language used to describe interacting with point-n-click computer interfaces. But that didn’t match the touchscreen experience.
People tried select and touch, which are corporate and wimpy, finally settling on the limp tap to describe what a human finger has to do when indicating a choice on a touchscreen. I know the motion isn’t clicking, there’s no snap through, but it’s not tapping either. Real tapping, even the pecking you might do on a bathroom door to find out if it’s occupied, is far more aggressive and definite than the soft, careful, tentative touch that a smartphone requires.
Select, Open, Navigate, Go To and Access
Nobody can tell me that these descriptions of interacting with point-n-click interfaces is informative. Using Select, Open, Navigate, Go To and Access is lazy. They are nonspecific and bland, with gauzy semantics.
Select, could be anything from a tap/click on a link, to a button/checkbox click/tap, to touching some magic area or word on the screen, to clicking on a pop-up item, to a menu pull down and item select. It could even mean something like highlighting a bunch of text, as for a copy-n-paste operation. Multiple meanings, which can’t be made clear by context.
Navigate, which can cover everything from a single click/tap, to a mix of clicks/taps, menu pull downs and selections, link follows, radio button checks, checkbox checks and pop-up choices.
Open, Go To and Access, are near synonyms to Navigate, they cover any kind of app/web navigation.
To be fair, most people use these flimsy words because of the instability of the menus, categories, buttons and special areas on screen. App and web developers are forever changing things according to whim I mean style of the day. Menu items change name, or move from one top-level category to another all the time. Designers just move them around on a whim, or more likely, on a manager’s whim.
Launch and Open
Launch, spawn and open constitute another category of lazy, floppy words that get used when describing what to do with a smartphone. Both of these words usually (about 55% of the time) mean to tap on an app’s icon to start or resume execution of that app, cause the graphics system to route taps and drags to the app and give it graphical control of the screen.
The other 45% of the time, these words end up as synonyms for Select, Open, Navigate, Go To and Access, a whole other category of things to do, which muddles what any of these words mean in practice.
App
We had perfectly good descriptive words for pieces of computer software before Windows. came along and Microsoft muddied the water in favor of their conception of user friendliness. Smartphones made that situation worse.
I’ve created a helpful chart to guide you through modern impotent nomenclature.
| Computer Science | Folklore |
|---|---|
| program | app |
| process | app |
| library | app |
| file | app |
| directory | folder |
| DLL | app |
| GUI | app |
| operating system | app |
| distributed system | app |
| communicating sequential processes | app |
This chart does not relieve any of us of the sins of every corporate entity having “The App”. That’s a sizable topic, for another day.
Disrespecting differences
There’s a number of words that are not exclusive to the hazy language used to describe smartphones, but are certainly part of it, These words are thematically unified by disrespect of differences.
Content and product blur the differences between distinct works of art or craft. Here, I use “craft” to denote a category of work that requires expertise and technique, but isn’t necessarily a departure from the state of the art. Is a web page news, or article the same as a YouTube video short? Welcome to the 21st century, they’re all “content”, as is a meme, a movie, a blog post and a podcast episode, and even merch like tee shirts. Using content for all of these shows a lack of respect for anyone who actually writes or makes anything.
We had perfectly good words for activities that we now use craft and author to describe. We built, assembled, or made things. Sometimes, we had a flash of inspiration and we created something. Now, we craft it. Flaccid.
Same with author, which I think combines “to write” and a little bit of graphic design. You may have a different definition, author is very poorly defined.
Tool
Tool as a noun, referring to software has lost any meaning. At one point in time, there was an idea of “software tools”. There was a 1976 book of that name by Brian Kernighan and PJ Plauger, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-03669-X. The book presented an argument for writing programs according to a particular style or philosophy, so that programs would work together. The idea was that assembling these “tool” style programs to do more elaborate tasks would be easy. Tool has been diluted to the point where nobody knows what it means.
Miscellaneous
The appearance of utilize anywhere except in a very narrow, technical, sense is a mark of deception by appearing to sound intelligent. Every such appearance could be changed to “use” and nothing would be lost, except false nuance.
The business jargon aligned or alignment puzzles me. What does this word mean? “Support”? “Governed by the right people”? It’s hard to say, it has no distinct meaning or definition. Same with deploy and deployment. Meaningless. Just nod along as if you understand when you hear them.