I had originally intended to attend the session on targeting Parrot with your programming language. But it’s Friday. And I don’t want to work. And r0ml is presenting a session. So I said screw it and now I’m being entertained by r0ml.

This talk is not about programming, but about rhetoric. In particular, the rhetoric used in business today. And how no one understands it.

So many words used in business today have other meanings. Meanings that have nothing to do with how they’re being used in business rhetoric. So what do we do? We put words together and pretend they mean something new. And, since we’re not German, we turn them into acronyms. Acronyms that may themselves mean something else. Confusing, isn’t it?

Here’s an idea. Go back in time to find words that mean something else, but that no one today remembers (at least, no more than a handful of people on the planet). Then redefine that word to mean whatever you want. This works particularly well if Google returns very few hits for the word in question. Of course, like anything, it can backfire.

After talking about the fallacy of rhetoric in modern business language, the remainder of the session was dedicated to replacing our modern business language with words from antiquity, almost all of which have meanings very close to what we want. I’m not surprised that most of the words come from the literary (as in books) domain. We are, after all, writing and publishing software.

Shamefully, no one recorded this session. I couldn’t even attempt to do it justice here.

This session has given me a desire to subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Who says the English language doesn’t have a proper word for what we mean by free software?

Liberal Software.

Duh.

Stupid politicians. Thanks guys.