What is it about hard work and intense play that inspire the creation of insider jargon?
Whether it's a waiter frantically telling another waiter to "86" the mahi-mahi (take it off the menu) or a cracker probing for "exploits" (security holes) in a new software release, lingo weaves the fabric of community among those who share a common goal.
The high-tech industry -- driven, cliquish, dominated by the young -- breeds buzz-phrases like standing water breeds mosquitoes. During his tenure at Microsoft as senior editor of Music Central, Ken Barnes collected some of the more colorful specimens of in-house argot into a lexicon of "Microspeak" that delivers a vivid picture of the notoriously insular corporate culture on the Redmond campus.
Music Central fizzled out last June, a victim of mismarketing and lack of technical support, Barnes says. But Barnes' lexicon lives on online at Jim Emerson's site for film lovers, CinePad. In perhaps the sincerest tribute his former employer could give it, Barnes reports that his lexicon has become an informal orientation tool for new Microsoft employees.
Wired News: When did you notice that your co-workers at Microsoft spoke a special collective jargon?
Ken Barnes: At my first meeting [laughing]. I was plunged right into it. There was no real instruction manual on how to do anything at Microsoft. I just found myself hearing these phrases in meetings and puzzling them out in context. So I started jotting them down.
WN: Why do you think that people working together develop jargon that goes beyond what they need to perform their shared tasks?
Barnes: Some of it's a natural shorthand, like the TLAs ("three-letter acronyms"). A lot of it is the sheer joy of creating an impenetrable argot to prevent outsiders from easily grasping it. I'm sure phone operators have their own slang -- any occupation you could think of.
WN: What is it about working in the high-tech industry that facilitates the creation of slang?
Barnes: You're blazing new trails. People are thinking in new ways, innovating constantly. It's the kind of climate where neologisms are bred like unicellular organisms -- a high-pressure Petri dish.
WN: You mention in the lexicon that there's an elaborate caste system at Microsoft, the "blue badges" ("full-time Microsoft employees, the Brahmins of the deeply ingrained Microsoft caste system, whose card keys have a blue background rather than the orange used for contractors") vs. the "v-dashes" (vendors), etc. Did the jargon mirror the caste system at all -- did those who were higher up use more of it?
Barnes: If you were a propellerhead [engineer], you probably used a lot of jargon anyway as your way of communicating with other people. If you had a job that had a lot of outreach, you probably toned it down. A lot of Microsoft people get thrust from developer positions into managerial slots and have to take a crash course in basic human relations.
WN: Did you find that certain phrases would move through the office like an infection, like one week everybody would be using "bubble up," and the next week everybody would be using "drill down?"
Barnes: There were definitely migratory patterns. A phrase would attain a certain vogue for awhile, then two or three months later it would migrate outside of Microsoft, and then sort of evaporate.
WN: How did you trace the etymologies of these phrases?
Barnes: Not in any particularly scholarly fashion. It was begun as a little pastime. I could try to determine, as much as possible, if a phrase had a strong Microsoft relevance or currency, as opposed to something that was in general circulation. I'm sure there are a lot of things in the lexicon that are used very widely.
WN: Did you ever notice that if Bill Gates used a phrase in a meeting, 50 people would be using it the next week?
Barnes: I heard that happened, but I didn't monitor it closely. A lot of the time, it would be something really banal, like [Microsoft president Steve] Ballmer picking up on Tom Cruise yelling "Show me the money!" and then saying it a few times in a speech, and then that phrase would be current for awhile.
WN: How did you collect the jargon?
Barnes: I kept track of what I heard, and then once people became aware of the lexicon, they would submit new things to me.
WN: Were there any expressions that seemed particularly revealing of certain mindsets?
Barnes: Certainly "FYIV" ("fuck you, I'm vested") is a certain mindset. There are a lot of people clinging on to their gigs until they can get vested, and then they get a little arrogant.
WN: Were there various subsets of Microspeak -- like Gen-X jargon for younger employees, and another flavor of it for old-school Unix engineers?
Barnes: The whole culture is so dominantly 20-to-35, I'm not sure there are enough people outside of that range to make a difference. There weren't a whole lot of Boomer-age people or above.
WN: Outside of Microsoft, there are all these stereotypes of what it's like inside Microsoft -- jokes about the Borg, "you will be assimilated," and so on. How do the people who work there deal with those stereotypes? Do they laugh them off?
Barnes: It depends on your level of loyalty and commitment. There are people there who are completely cynical, and there are people who are true-blue, blind, wild-eyed followers of the Gatesian manifesto. To a lot of people in there, the characterization of Microsoft as a Borg-like hive mind is completely laughable. When you see how many different divisions are pursuing the same goal, it's more like a hundred-headed hydra than a unified groupmind.
We [at Music Central] were a very different sort of group, because we were music and movies-oriented, something entirely new. We sort of shook up the old-line Microsoft people a little bit. There was a famous story: When the project was just starting, another program manager took our program manager aside and said, "You people are just having too much fun."
WN: Do you think jargon helps people see in new ways, or blinds them?
Barnes: Both. It creates its own box that you think within, but it's also an effective shortcut. There are people who speak in almost nothing else, and that certainly limits them. Marketing people fall victim to that syndrome, and there are a lot of marketing terms in the lexicon. They would always come up with something unfathomable.
