Semantic Extension and the World of the Internet

In The Structure of English for Readers, Writers, and Teachers, Mary M. Clark says “perhaps the most common method of word formation is the addition of a new meaning to an already existing word” (Clark 29). It was a surprise to me to read that about semantic extension because we create so many words through affixation, blending, and compounding. Perhaps it should not have been a surprise to me because the pace of modern inventions seems to be accelerating; plus, I work in a field that didn’t exist at the time I was born.

I work in web development and the invention of the internet created dozens of new words to support the technology. Many of those words, like web, existed prior to the technology. It’s convenient to use existing words and change the meaning slightly to create new vocabulary. For example, in a web application, we refer to the “front end” and the “back end” programming when we are describing, respectively, the part of a program that is seen through the browser versus the part of a program that is doing the actual processing and is never seen by the user.

When I think about the pervasiveness of the internet and how complicated it is, it starts to make sense to me that semantic extension would be used to create so many new words. We can get an understanding of the vocabulary because we already understand one definition for a word. When I talk about the scalability of a computer program, you may already have a sense of what I mean since you probably already understand the concept of drawing something “to scale.” If information technology creators had instead decided to use eponymy, you might have to understand who Martin Odersky was before you could remember the meaning of “Oderskable” programming languages.

Even the development methodology on my project is full of semantic extension. We use a methodology called Agile that is adaptable and quick. Our teams are called “scrums” a term borrowed from rugby. Scrums are self-managing teams of computer professionals. We have “ceremonies” to celebrate the completion of three-week “sprints” and a “retrospective” at the end of each sprint. In fact, I don’t believe there is a single term in this methodology that has not been created using semantic extension.

When I look at it more closely, the use of semantic extension to create most new vocabulary begins to make a lot of sense. Some of the concepts of internet technology are difficult to understand. Why would we create another barrier by selecting vocabulary to describe that new technology that is completely new? The simple answer is that we would not.