A survey by Gadget Helpline had over 5,000 users come up with a list of the 10 most confusing technological terms.
Terms such as WAP, dongle, and cookie are among the many words leaving users scratching their heads.
The firm is asking for simplistic words that reflect the actual meaning rather than the overwhelming amount of jargon currently in place.
The Plain English Campaign, insisting that this would help bring down the “walls of techno-babble”, supports this motion.
The campaign secretary for the Plain English Campaign, Peter Griffiths, explained to BBC that it is possible to relieve exasperated users by making the technology world easier to understand and therefore navigate.
He said, “We need to pull our head our of the digital clouds and use plain English.”
He added pragmatically, “If changing the name isn’t an option then a glossary of terms would work. Not only does it explain the language, but it’s a nice way of learning for people who don’t have such a good grasp of the language.”
Seemingly simple words such as Digital TV have joined the English language but few people actually understand its practical meaning.
This becomes exponentially more perplexing when you take into account that many companies have varying names for identical products.
“One way of linking peripherals to a Mac was via an interface called FireWire. On a Sony it is called i.LINK and it’s also called Lynx by Texas Instruments, even though all three are exactly the same thing. That hardly makes things easy for the consumer,” said Alex Watson, editor of Custom PC magazine.
“Even when the industry tries to appeal to regular people, it doesn’t always work. Take Wi-Fi – it was named solely because of HiFi. Wireless fidelity doesn’t actually mean anything, but the alternative was 802.11B which hardly trips off the tongue.”
He told the BBC that part of the problem is that companies experience immense pressure to construct catchy marketing-friendly terms as well as words that will connect them to the actual meaning, some of which may become a part of the public vernacular.
Mr. Watson says that as users become more familiarized with words, the language surrounding it will constantly evolve.
“It may be called Wi-Fi but most people would call it a wireless network, which is exactly what it is,” he said.
The Top 10 list:
- Dongle
- Cookie
- WAP
- Phone jack
- (Nokia) Navi Key
- Time shifting
- Digital TV
- Ethernet
- PC Suite
- Desktop
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