Breaking the Digit-Head Codes

IT’S OUT OF CONTROL. They’re shoveling their “in-terms” at us the way coal-stokers used to smash coal into the boilers…the way pate suppliers force-feed a Swiss goose.

Funny: In all the articles I’ve written for trade magazines, I’ve always believed the purpose is to inform, on the reader’s level. That precept doesn’t seem to apply to the new generation of magazines written and edited by a coterie but distributed to outsiders, who are left to their own devices to decode what these non-communicators are trying to transmit.

One key group of perpetrators is cursed with initialitis – using initials without explaining what they mean.

We’ve used initials to replace a word-title since before World War II. If you’re a geezer you remember the initials WPA, which I think represented “Works Progress Administration” or something like that. We had OSS (Office of Strategic Services) which eventuated into CIA (Competence Isn’t Available).

Most people knew, in general, what these initials meant, so communication still wasn’t unwired. (That more than half still don’t know what APR stands for doesn’t seem to bother financial institutions at all.)

The digit-heads brought initialitis into full flower with Y2K, that overblown Chicken Little prediction that the sky was falling. In the desperation that comes from initialitis withdrawal, they quickly came up with another one: B2B, which neatly saps dignity and purpose from “business-to-business” communications.

I’m 150% convinced that initialitis is the unhappy result of a desire to be recognized as an authoritarian source…by “labelers” who have no right to make such a claim.

Get this, from an article supposedly explaining “B2B e-marketplaces” in a magazine that can’t claim esoteric readership because it was sent to me:

From an architectural viewpoint, B2B data integration is closely related to EAI, also known as application-to-application integration (or A2A, the term I’ll use here)…B2B technologies increasingly leverage XML and extensible style language (XSL) for data integration, in addition to the process-integration support via message brokering and workflow automation typical of A2A solutions…Given the numerous existing and possible standard and nonstandard data interchange formats – EDI, X12, SWIFT, delimited, positional, multiple XML document type definitions (DTDs) and schemas, and so on…

Yeah, and so on.

OK, CIA, put your cryptography section onto this one. I’ll bet you come up with the same diagnosis I did: chronic initialitis, CMC (Call the Menninger Clinic).

But seriously, folks…

The supposed point of acronyms is clarity. I’ve stomped before on the unholy trend of creating acronyms that require delving back into earlier text or wrestling with Internet sources for comprehension.

I’m looking at a magazine article with the innocuous title “Time for a Change.” I wish the writer had changed this self-defeater: “Consider how difficult it is to explain benchmark results to management in terms of your support costs per CPU MIPs and disk GBs.”

OK, I’m considering.

I think CPU means “central processing unit.” MIP? Uh…Disk GBs? Imported from Great Britain? No reference, no explanation, no lifting of the filmy mist from which oozes the “public be damned” attitude of the in-group coterie.

Next: “…a document access description (DAD) construct enabling document-to-database mapping, and an XMLVAR CHAR column datatype…”

Not even consistency here. Why do we need DAD for “document access description,” whatever that means, and not need DTD for “document-to-database”? Is the intention to educate the reader or to say to that reader, “I know something you don’t”?

Ah! That brings me to the second group of obfuscators – databasers, who also are communications debasers.

Oh, I’m perfectly aware that I’ll probably get hate mail from database experts who don’t subscribe to the unholy concept of opaquing what they do. No, guys, send your hate mail to your confreres who feel that fogging up a point with in-talk impresses outsiders.

Impresses? Depresses is closer to the reaction we outlanders have to bylined articles in publications aimed at us (or so I assume, since somebody decided to send me the magazine based on whatever demographic assumption the circulation department came up with), bulging with befoggers such as…

– It is a good idea to know how much input resource you consume compared to your peers to produce the same unit of output.

– In an entity-relation (E/R) diagram, the “supplied” verb is only an annotation in the diagram. There are no semantics in support of this verb. If the part-supplier relationship is many-to-one, meaning that each part is supplied by one and only one supplier, then we explicitly define a hierarchy that key relationships between the tables can enforce.

– One practical approach for managing many-to-many transformation multiplicity is to reduce the problem down to a common denominator: transformations between any two XML schemas [sic].

– Complex business logic will always remain a combination of static data relationships and adherence to procedural sequences.

Get the idea?

The words all exist. “Transformation” is a perfectly good word. So is “multiplicity.” The writer Crazy-Glues them together: “transformation multiplicity.” We’re at sea in a boat that leaks rhetoric from every bulkhead.

The technique of stringing words together in an impenetrable sequence undoubtedly requires a combination of TUC (totally uncontrolled chutzpah) and adherence to ORC (obstinate refusal to communicate).

Take that, you SOBs!