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If we are to survive as a society, we need to speak a common language.

The misunderstandings that arise when people can’t communicate with one another can have serious cultural and economic consequences.

Since this is the United States, it makes sense that the common language should be English.

But there are those who continue to insist that another language should be given equal footing.

I’m referring, of course, to the language gap that exists between those of us who speak English and those who insist on speaking in computerese.

These two groups of people are often at loggerheads, trying to establish a dialogue where none is possible because of linguistic obstacles.

Computers permeate modern life. When something goes wrong with one of them, most often a computerese speaker will be called to fix it. And most often, that person will have to deal with an English speaker to get at the root of the problem.

Such exchanges tend to go something like this:

“I pressed some wrong button and the stuff on my screen went away. I need that stuff that was on my screen.”

“Did you save your work product to your hard drive before the crash?”

“Huh? It was there then it wasn’t.”

“Did you check your scratch file?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“From the start menu we’ll just go to programs then click on applications and there’s a file folder with all your recent functions. It does an auto save every two minutes so your changes should be on the server. Any time you lose data in the word mode you can retrieve it just like that.”

“Uh, thanks.”

Or:

“I went to sign on to my machine this morning and it didn’t work.”

“Did you type in your user name?”

“My what now?”

“Your user name.”

“I typed in the same thing I type every day only today it didn’t work.”

“You probably overwrote your password into the profile name field. We’ve been getting that a lot lately. Just do a restart and make sure your user ID number matches your user name and that the domain is at the default setting then enter your password.”

“I just forgot my password.”

Sadly, the whole English-computerese disconnect could be avoided. Many computerese speakers learned English as their first language.

But disuse leads to atrophy.

Otherwise, we could have conversations that make sense.

“I pressed some wrong button and the stuff on my screen went away. I need that stuff that was on my screen.”

“The stuff on your screen went away? That stinks. You probably pressed the doo-hickey one too many times.”

“Yeah, I think that’s what I did, I pressed the doo-hickey.”

“Well, just click on the little picture of the manila folder then click the picture of the curvy arrow.”

“Ah, the curvy arrow. Now I understand.”

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E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com.