Archive for October 15th, 2008

Lexicography (or, Not All Publics is Created Equal)

The Intelligence Community has a language all its own, as any reasonably insular, reasonably technically-inclined community does. Yet the IC is, if not unique, then at least unusual in that it invents little of its own language; rather, it adopts words and phrases from other fields of study. It’s easy to be cynical, and say this is because the intelligence community doesn’t really “invent” anything, but that’s not really true. I think the problem is more that the IC doesn’t communicate very well, and so you have “parallel evolution”, where the same idea gets invented, independently, by two or more (people|groups|organizations) at roughly similar times. Being - of course - aware of this shortcoming (yet doing little, except on paper, to rectify it), the people who do come up with new ideas don’t give them clever names. (Or maybe they do: there could be something called a “Jones Analysis” out there, but that whole lack-of-communication thing means I, and most other people, have never heard of it.)
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Published in: General, Geekiness, Security | on October 15th, 2008 | No Comments »