Language

‘Less’ is the clarion call of 37 Signals. It embodies its creed: a single word, a single syllable. Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, has this to say.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

The problem with ‘Less’ is that it relies on explanation, on prior statements, on a philosophy already in place. It is a shorthand, a code, and as that, it is highly effective. A single word, in a certain context, carries a weight of meaning.

However, by itself it is useless for evangelising. It needs to be backed up with that philosophy, contrasted with all those situations that have too much of something. Too much interference, too many features, too many goals, too many people to keep happy.

What does ‘Less’ mean? Enough, and no more.

I often stare enviously at people with words on their jumpers and t-shirts. The strings of characters are so full of promise: a link to faraway places, a sense of belonging. They proclaim membership of exclusive clubs: we have been somewhere, the letters seem to say.

Reality, by way of contrast, is disappointing. Would I really want to proclaim myself an alumnus of Standford or Cambridge? Not really, even if I were one—it seems too much like bragging. Worse, I would open myself to be judged not as an individual but as a member of some strange entity over which I have little or no control.

So why do I still feel that lure, that tug of power? I think the answer is a simple one: words have power, power to induce and command, power to shape the world. Words have power because we give them power; having given it, they have power over us. The aesthetic seduction of pleasing letter-forms is part of the attraction to a designer and a writer, but the true power is in the words themselves, not in their presentation.

When I see a character from a different alphabet I wonder, what does it mean? I can appreciate Arabic or Katakana for the shapes alone, but that question is always lurking in my mind, trying to give the words the power of meaning.

Something guaranteed to make me wince is passing places with names like ‘Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe’. Not only is it anachronistic—tea came to England from India in the middle of the seventeenth century, carried by merchant ships to a nation on the cusp of the modern age—but it it also maintains the illusion that the word ‘ye’ has any place in the dictionary beyond an etymological footnote.

‘Ye’ is the Middle and Early Modern English nominative of ‘you’; all well and good, no complaints here—feel free to carry on singing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ at Christmas. It’s its employment as a replacement for ‘the’ that I object to.

Reading the word ‘ye’, the contemporary reader assumes that (like the other ‘ye’ mentioned above) it is pronounced yee, rhyming with ‘be’ or ‘me’. Doubtless if one were to speak with the proprietors of establishments employing the word in their names, they would assent to this conclusion.

This is, quite simply, wrong. It’s wrong not because a word written ‘ye’ shouldn’t be pronounced like that, but because (in this day and age) the letter shouldn’t be a ‘y’ at all.

I don’t know whether it’s my increasing knowledge of content-management systems, databases and the like, or if the usage of this term is indeed on the rise, but lately I seem to be seeing the word ‘metadata’ everywhere.

What is metadata? Briefly, it’s data that explains how a particular chunk of data—a file, for example—fits into some more general organisational scheme. An mp3 file, for example, might have metadata saying who recorded it, who composed it, and when, and what genre the song is. A blog post might have metadata about the author, publication date, and the number of comments on that article.

So far, so uncontroversial. Clearly this kind of data is important and useful. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we cannot properly comprehend the meaning of a piece of data without viewing it through the lens of its attached metadata. What’s my problem, then? Pretty simple: we already have an excellent term meaning just what metadata does, and it doesn’t sound so stupid.

The name of this term? Context. If you want to be long-winded, you can use ‘contextual information’, but it means pretty much the same. ‘Metadata’ is a redundant term that people employ simply because they want to sound cool, to sound cutting-edge, to sound like technologists. It’s just PR, and pretty crap PR at that. It adds nothing of value to the discourse; in fact, it devalues it, by replacing a simple and elegant term (that we’re all pretty sure of the meaning of) with a vague buzzword.