Having spent a week surrounded by programmers, I have felt at times annoyed and at times bemused by the language they speak. Any computer magazine can list the latest buzzwords in the industry, but I have found a theme that has intrigued me since 1982: the use of metaphor in language.

Among the most aggravating techie terms of the week:

1. I never thought I'd hear "weblify" in a sentence. OK, I never thought I'd hear it period. Want to make a feature you are already using work on a web page - just "Weblify" it!
2. Techies never refer to a convenient feature that allows you to do something quickly and easily as "doing it quick and easy", they are compelled to call it "On the Fly". If I had a dollar for every time I heard "on the fly" this week, I'd be making money "on the fly"
3. This year I noticed that programs were never "elegant" or "strong" or "powerful", for some reason (maybe the obsessive coffee drinking habits of programmers or the wine tasting that comes with instant wealth), programs are now all more "Robust".
4. Speaking of taste, whatever happened to such simple words as "type" or "version", why must ever different variation of the same program be called a "Flavor"? "I prefer Debian Linux, what flavor do you use?" Me? I prefer pistachio!

Why use a metaphor instead of some other quite simple descriptive term? because it's something our minds easily understand? or because, as Mark Johnson proposes, meaning itself is tied to bodily experience.

Some of my favorite examples of metaphor in language come from Johnson's comprehensive philosophical tome: The Body in the Mind. He shows how you really can apply a few basic schematics to all human language that show how language itself is built on metaphor. For example our experience of "containment" results in expressions that use the metaphoric idea of "in" and "out"-ness: "throw out", "take out", "shout out", we drown out the music, we hand out information, we leave out the relevant information. There is in and out-ness, and up and down-ness and on and off-ness and more: "we got off the track", "we go on to the natural conclusion". When someone is disparaging their character we say "what a put down".

Johnson's theories are important because they are actually a theory of rationality and imagination long mistaken for psychology. Philosophers have been trying to solve the "mind/body" problem for thousand's of years. So, although these theories have serious academic import, the computer world becomes just one more living example that the body is in the mind. We can not help extend our bodily experience into the world of ideas.

And speaking of the computer world, there are obvious metaphors such as "we aren't writing new versions of software, we are "up-grading", or "converting" or lately "migrating"". I'm ready to migrate but I can't find my tent! I have to migrate from version 5.8 to version 7.12, and me without my passport. When a software can operate with many computer languages it is said to "communicate" or "talk to" or lately: "the Java client is great because it "walks across" different applications". When we want to access data at a detail level, we don't request it, we "drill down" for it; I'm still waiting to strike oil. When something is part of the code it is "built in", when it works automatically for us it is "transparent to the user", or my favorite from this week: yes you still have to convert from 5.5 to 5.8, but you won't know it because the installation is "under the covers".

After the earthquake a lot of bridges were retrofitted to make them stronger. A retrofit is a cute word itself, to go back and make a necessary repair. What of a similar situation with software that needs to be fixed up, well we "apply a patch" as if the software itself had got a flat, but this week I heard "the new module will work well when we finish the retrofit". Maybe software will be earthquake safe soon too.

I could go on and on with my favorite subject, but I'm all out of ideas!