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Thursday February 9th 2012

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LOL Speak v/s Tech Speak

With the popularization of the infectiously absurd but funny internet meme, the LOL Cats, LOL speak is now among the in-things in the present day pop culture lingo, in line with ‘RESTECP’ as said by Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘Ali G InDaHouse‘ and ‘All your base are belong to us’, from the Jap game ‘Zero-Wing’.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

I can’t able to access the central server.
He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

  • What the techie says:
  • What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

Reader Feedback

14 Responses to “LOL Speak v/s Tech Speak”

  1. skimpy says:

    one of my TC (technocoolie friends) once asked me – where do you want to settle down SK? in india or onsite?

  2. Hari says:

    @skimpy,
    Another lovely example of Tech Speak. I saw it on your LJ.

    My Mum heard about onsite from someone else and asked me what it meant, and on explaining it, was quite surprised about why I hadn’t used it when I had put trips. I remember telling you about this during arbit walk.

  3. ameya says:

    Most common things i have heard were….

    “He said me to come”

    “I have to make my resume (pronounced as resume(without the accent))”

  4. Hari says:

    @ameya,
    More song ideas come to mind with the
    ‘I said you’ and all that. Will unleash once they are further concretized.

  5. Ravi says:

    Once again… I’d written a lengthy post laang, laang ago about something similar.

    A few examples that I can recall from that post: ‘There are a lot many options available’; ‘common man’ (used during chats instead of ‘come on, man! — or perhaps they’re biggggg fans of R K Laxman :P . One new thing I’ve observed after ‘coming to onsite’ is that people send emails with subjects that read “Female accomodation required” (They *always* miss out an ‘m’ in ‘accommodation’ and they *always* think it has a gender…) More later… else this comment’s gonna be longer than the post!

  6. Ravi says:

    Hey where’d the “Who polices the police” (rather… who watches the watchmen?) post go?

  7. VArun says:

    Beat this:
    1)A bug is an arror, which cant be able to fix until you debug it the bug!

    2)The CAT is a dangerous CAT,make yourself committment towards the manager regarding about this dangerous CAT

    3) Varun:- Where u?
    XXXXX: I am here, u where u?( Tum Kahaan ho)

  8. Vivek says:

    @Hari,
    LOL! ;)
    usage of onsite has reached crazy levels – About 3 weeks back, someone in the office mentioned he’d be going to Aus/NZ for his honeymoon in Nov.
    Heard later -’He’s going to onsite in Nov.’ – no kidding.
    P.S. – i deliberately dont want to put mother language and be accused of acting amit_123types.:)

  9. Vivek says:

    @Hari,

    whoa!.. something’s wrong wit the formatting dude.. the wink was after ‘LOL’(dammit!) and spaces missing in last line.

  10. Hari says:

    @Ravi,
    Three posts can be viewed at once, check out archives or older posts. heh.

  11. Hari says:

    @Ravi,
    common is one more good addition, I am going to add this to the Tech Speak lexicon. Also, if you’ve noticed, SKimpy has already unleashed his bit about the ‘onsite’ thing already.

    I think accommodation can be exempt, as it is common human error, though specifying the gender of said accommodation definetely deserves a mention!

  12. Hari says:

    @VArun,
    More pertinent additions to my lexicon. Many thanks!

  13. Hari says:

    @Vivek,
    Hardly, if ever do Indians travel abroad for pleasure, hence the onsite thing isn’t really unwarranted, but the whole funda of calling abroad as onsite is just about enough to make sane junta cringe.

  14. Hari says:

    @Vivek,
    Oh screw the emoticons and the LOLs, you’re not a woman.

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