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An enhanced calendered-cellulose probe Tech Speak or How to Talk High
Tech by Edward Tenner, Kogan Page, pp 123, Pounds sterling 3.99 pbk

HOW GOOD is your Tech Speak? Can you communicate in postcolloquial discourse
modulation protocol for user status enhancement? I was only asking.

We have 10 copies of a guide to this accretive substantive-compound
formulation tool that we are eager to award to those unfortunate souls who
have nothing better to do than to present us with their most amazing illustrations
of this bizarre language. It could be fun; on the other hand, those of you
in the northern hemisphere could be too busy building an accretedcrystalline
anthropoid homologue with, naturally, carbon ocular surrogates and a cranial
thermal gasket. Antipodeans, meanwhile, could be absorbed in their open-air
thermal accumulators for aromatic and digestive appeasement.

Edward Tenner, who in his job as the executive editor of Princeton University
Press faces the unenviable task of translating Tech Speak into English,
has his revenge in print. He has come up with an intriguing guide on ‘How
to talk high tech’, the subtitle to his book, Tech Speak. He says the language
is not simply pompous or euphemistic talk. For example, ‘Barbers used to
call themselves ‘tonsorial artists’ . . . This wasn’t Tech Speak. A correct
self-description would have been keratin management professionals . . .’
The man clearly has a mission.

In his discourse on the history, status and future of Tech Speak, Tenner
describes how keen horticulturalists might use tactile attenuators to protect
themselves from piercing poison shafts of arthropod pollination vectors
while attending to the vertical nutrient-solution transport systems and
photosynthetic panels in herbaceous refineries.

Still interested? There are lots more case histories: my favourite is
the canine seclusion habitat with its tension guidance coupling, nutrient
uptake reservoir and rotary-airfoil interception system (floppy ears, I
think). If only life in the doghouse was that romantic.

Tenner blames the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 for originating
Tech Speak: ‘The dawn of legalese, leading to assizes of novel disseisin,
escheats, formedons, easements, reversions, chattels, and other bulwarks
of our liberty.’ No wonder King Harold copped a streamlined force concentrator.
What’s your favourite Tech Speak?