Language and Technology

In this short piece we will discuss the use of language surrounding technology. One genre with copious amounts of technology jargon and description is of course science-fiction, and contains many excellent examples of technology in language.

Here we will look at a quote from 'War of the Worlds' written by H.G.Wells that describes a 'Tripod', a three-legged alien invasion craft:

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand... Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me.

There are a few things that are repeated both within this extract and also within countless other novels and works of fiction of the same genre, many of which are inspired by 'War of the Worlds'. First off is the repeated descriptors of 'glittering' and 'metallic', and in one case even 'glittering metal'. A very large proportion of human technology are constructed largely out of metals, so it is natural that human novelists would apply similar traits to alien invaders such that the audience can more easily understand the nature of the antagonistic alien machinery by comparing it to familiar concepts held by humans. For instance, this description of a tripod conjured up in me the image of a shining silver tank performing long distance leap-froggery on three long legs, segmented for flexibility, with smoke occasionally rushing out of small gaps and outlets, and an undefined amount of tentacles that look like the machine's legs, but thinner and shorter for greater dexterity, all of them probing the space around on the search for objects to interact with, all whilst this metal alien tank is towing behind it by one of these appendages a woven metal cage.