thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

I have been out in cyberspace again, trying to find meanings for some of the expressions I get stuck on.

I wasn’t going to; I was going to give up.  Then an old friend emailed me about my blog. She’s an editor too and she confessed that she doesn’t understand the words either. So I’m not the only one, I thought.

The only way to be happy, she advised me, is to “just check the spelling”. May be she’s right, I thought. She seems to be happy. But then I read on – she confessed more. She has worked for E&Y and said:

“I hope you’re not trying to edit something I originally wrote for them!”

I imagined her laughing as she said it, tossing her mane of dark hair. So, I thought. At what price happiness? Have those others got her under some spell, in their power? Has she gone over to the side of conspirators who are secretly laughing at editorial staff everywhere? The ones who invent expressions like ‘improvement levers’ and ‘technology imperative’?

I was at a low ebb. Perhaps I am all alone in this world of corporate speak. And if they’ve got my friend, how long before they get me?

I have to crack their code, understand their ways, know my enemy.

So I started by googling ‘technology imperative’. Many books have been written about this but it would take me some time to read them all.

Then I discovered this webpage, and I understood the words. It was written by some bloke at Aberystwyth University – an academic, but it’s still reasonably clear. It turns out a ‘technology imperative’ is actually a ‘technological imperative’, and it’s about technological developments being inevitable.

I was very excited. So it does mean something after all.

I’m beginning to think it’s not the language. It’s me. I am stupid.

There are certain simple things I want to do on this blog. I want to make the comments section bigger, so that more of my readers can tell me I’m wrong. I want people to be able to subscribe for e-alerts or something, to let them know when the dangling modifier is updated. I want to do things that keep people coming back. I want to rule the so-called ‘blogosphere’.

But what happens when I try to do these things? I find myself floating around in cyberspace, that’s what.

Not floating in that nice spacy way you get in dreams, where you drift along on the clouds until you want to come back down to earth. Where you float through the windows of someone’s house. No, this is the horrible uncontrolled floating where you bang into things and hurt yourself.

So, if I put ‘comment box’ into the search box on WordPress I get:

“cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin”

And further down the page, another ‘plug-in’:

“AJAXed Wordpress (aWP) is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and Wordpress to improve the user experience.”

Amazing! Or so I think until I realise that they don’t mean the household cleaner. These words are slicing through my mind, scratching on my brain like skates on ice.

What can I do? I’m so confused I end up having to turn to geeks. They smile knowingly, push their glasses up their noses and grin. I have asked several for help – I don’t want to wear any friendships too thin – and there is a moment with all of them where I can see they are enjoying the power, the knowledge that they can help, that I am at their mercy.

Of course I resent that. What self-respecting confused person wouldn’t resent that? By not knowing this stuff, by not being able to follow descriptions like:

“Increases Wordpress’ default search functionality through an options panel”

I am giving them the opportunity to smirk, call me names – names I’ve never come across before, like ‘blog tart’.

One of them even tells me I don’t need e-alerts, because there’s an RSS feed on my blog. I’m supposed to know about this web 2.0 malarkey, so I pretend to understand and slink off to see if I can get that working by myself.

Another one says something about folksonomy. Folksonomy? What sort of a word is that? Hippies, guitars, bandannas and beach fires spring to mind. Come on every body and sing. And when I ask what that is, he says:

“You should know. You bloggers invented it.”

Me! Me? I would never invent a word like that. Never. But I don’t show my dismay. Instead I scuttle off to find out what it means.

Thank God for wikipedia – at least I know what a wiki is. It turns out that ‘folksonomy’:

“describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging”.

So there we are then.