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| Friday's Phrase: "interoperability" |
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| Monday, 06 September 2004 | |
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03
September, 2004: Here's a basic truth: never trust an eight-syllable
word. Here's an eight-syllable word that is anything but basic (or
truthful): "interoperability"…
Long words are always dangerous. They also seem to expand in inverse proportion to the ease with which their meaning can be distilled. If in doubt, just think of "don't split church and state"*. It's as well to be suspicious when people use long words to discuss simple concepts. The buzzword "interoperability" falls into this category. At essence, it is like a simple "+" drawn from Boolean algebra placed between two systems or networks elements. They "work together" or are blessed with "connectivity" or even "interconnectivity". This places 'interoperability" as one of those rare words for which there is no longer substitute word or phrase. Time to double the suspicion. The result is that 'interoperability' has an identity crisis of meaning. On the one hand, it infers a major achievement in making things simpler, more workable; at the same time, it implies a degree of complexity required to reach this state of seamless interconnected bliss. As is so often the case, this distinction becomes important when you examine those who use this phrase; what they are saying is, "we've delivered simplicity, but by techniques so complex that the rest of you are too simple to understand." We have interoperability! For all that, 'interoperability' has a particular Achilles heel. We've all heard (no pun intended) words that are described as 'onomatopoeic', words like 'buzz' and 'moo' and 'hoot' which when read aloud sound like they... er... sound in the real world. In that case, 'interoperability' is surely 'conceptually onomatopoeic'. It's a bitty word, ratcheted together, its individual syllables packed with short vowels and eschewing long vowel sounds, dipthongs, complex consonants or ellisions. It doesn't work as a word that flows smoothly. It's the sort of word that probably sounds best when spoken by a computer: "we have in-ter-op-er-a-bil-it-y". This only redoubles the irony that, presented as a badge for creating order out of chaos, every time it's uttered it serves to remind us of the turmoil that remains beneath. It's a grubby world of 'patches' and 'fixes', of sticky tape and string that bring these obstinate stand-alone pieces of network – and the obstinate stand-alone syllables within 'interoperability' – together. This does not mean that interoperability as a process, or 'interoperability' as a word, are bad things. After all, how else would we justify the existence of systems integrators? Jim Chalmers * "antidisestablishmentarianism", arguably the longest non-scientific word in the English language. It weighs in at 12 syllables, or only 50% more than 'interoperability'… |
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