Robot Is A Hijacked Word | Hacker News Reader

Robot Is A Hijacked Word

rodneybrooks.com

49 pointsmayava49 comments

This is how language works. Words get tweaked, re-purposed, misunderstood, munged, combined, slurred, abused, enriched, extended, negated, confused, and broken. It's very likely you are the only person with your particular perception of any particular word and all of its connotations. But the rest of the world doesn't care. Life and language move on and evolve with or without your own favorite semantics. You can embrace and enjoy the change or whine and complain, but it will happen. Better to enjoy the ride.

> Words get tweaked, re-purposed, misunderstood, munged, combined, slurred, abused, enriched, extended, negated, confused, and broken

Or as I call it, twepurdgerruchxtegused

ken

Is that the same kind of phenomenon we see with words/phrases like Sharing Economy, Fake News, Throwing Shade?

Google sure is fast:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

give them some time to crawl and this will be the only hit when googling that!! (I'ok add a reminder to check in 1 week from now!)

> You can embrace and enjoy the change or whine and complain, but it will happen. Better to enjoy the ride.

Yup, I whined and complained about "hackers" (you mean crackers!!) for a long time until I realised it was futile.

There's an option between whining and enjoying the ride, which seems to be missed by descriptivists: to be an active participant in language as a creative exercise. I see these etymological explorations as prime examples of participatory linguistics.

Also, to be fair, this is a borrowed and now incorporated term in the English language. If we were using Robot the way we use Robot in English in Czech, then I can see the complaint having more validity --but here it's like complaining that borrowed French words don't have the same meaning in English as they do in their native French. Or us complaining about how English words incorporated into Japanese[1] have weird idiosyncratic and unique meanings some with great distance from the original English. Imagine some learned Japanese going about how those words are used improperly and don't map perfectly to what they mean in English.

[1]http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/false-friends.html

> If we were using Robot the way we use Robot in English in Czech

I am little confused by this, so I might be reading it wrong... In any case, the meaning of "robot" is the same in Czech as it is in English. Capek obviously did not live in an era where technology for robots as we know them today existed, however from the description of how robots were supposed to act and look like it seems very similar to later sci-fi version of "purely technological" creations.

btw, according to Czech wikipedia (that seems to be sourced to Capek's own article in Czech "Lidove noviny" daily), Capek initially considered word "labor" to be used.

Robot - robota etc is Slavic word for "work" or "labor" as you mention. Basically it was thought of as "the entity that exists to only work/produce" (and no other human-my activity whatsoever such as relax, sleep, have fun, etc.)

I'm pretty sure Dawkins isn't too thrilled with how 'meme' is used nowadays, either. Such is life.

I hope he'd appreciate the memetic irony that the word has taken on a life of its own

Except on Wikipedia, where words get disambiguated and wikilinked, slowly encouraging people towards a shared vocabulary and understanding. Robots are machines, androids are artificial people, bots are software, robo- is just a general neologism for new concepts. Nobody's hijacked robot, just derived new terms.

Soften the R-phoneme into an L-ish one, or harsh the L into an R, and maybe pronounce it a bit more Russian than Czech: 'Robot' is not a Slavonic root, it is a close cousin of the Latin 'labor'. Swap vowel and consonant in the first syllable: See, that's German 'arbeit' ('work'). A robot is a worker, the word is ancient and Indoeuropean.

Also: I am clearly not a linguist.

I don't think there is good evidence to suggest a connection between English robot and Latin labor (earlier labos), but robot is cognate with German Arbeit [1]. All the sources I normally use say labor is of uncertain etymology.

It is not enough to just rationalize a possible set of sound changes that would lead to a transformation; you need to also prove that such sound changes are consistent with sound changes that normally occur in the divergence of two related languages.

1. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot

Actually, looking up the Sanskrit for 'work' suggests to me that I am on fairly solid ground: '√अरर्य'. transcribed as 'ararya'.

That word is actually from the word for "awl" and means "to (work with) awl". There are lots of phonological coincidences in languages, which is why the methodology I was hinting at is so important.

I know there are.

But listen, we agree on the relatedness of Slav 'rabo/robo' and Germanic 'Arbeit' (same in all Scandinavian languages), right? That relatedness very clearly suggests a very old, common Indoeuropean ancestor. Latin 'labor' really doesn't sound like an all to unikely cousin, then.

I am also not a linguist, but at least in Polish, the term "robot" or its derivatives are used as a root of other words:

Robotnik - construction worker

Robota - Work/labor and sometimes Job

Robocizna - Billable work

Robic - to do something

and there might be others i cant think of right now

Yes, they come from the same proto-indo-european root! The word is still slavic, since that's how the proto-indo-european root changed in the territories inhabited by slavic people, as opposed to the changes that happened in latin. Same how "arbeit" is germanic. If you go back long enough, German, Italian and Czech are the same language, but that doesn't mean that modern classification of differences isn't relevant.

I didn't mean to imply that they were. Just pointing out the kinship.

I don't think it's actually been hijacked at all, not like "hacker". If you say "I build robots", most people are going to understand that to mean electromechanical machines, not chatbots or webcrawlers. All it takes is context.

The second hijacking is mostly "bot", not "robot".

For real hijacking, there's "android". An android is a humanoid robot, not a mobile telephone.

Give Google a couple decades and let'a talk about it then ;)

(Skynet is coming!!!!) ("They" monitor the everyday actions of millions, if that doesn't give Skynet an edge on how to take over humanity, what will????)

If Google Now would be capable of open topic conversation and reasoning, it would be worthy of the name "bot".

So is computer.

It too, used to refer to a person, rather than a machine. (albeit a long time ago).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=computer

True, for some definitions of "a long time ago"

Dorothy Vaughan and other "computers" were doing calculations by hand as a career into the early 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan

She was recently portrayed in the film 'Hidden Figures', right? I haven't seen it, but it looks quite interesting.

Robot is also the word used for traffic lights in South Africa: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=387828

There is nothing particularly remarkable about Czech/Slavonic word "robota" (serfdom) being mentioned in English as a technical term for the system in force in Austria (and the Czech lands), nine years before it was abolished. In some countries it continued even longer.

Undoubtedly Čapek had chosen that word for a good reason.

However, to make up some kind of thesis that this mention of serfdom in 1839 was therefore the first appearance of "Robot" in English is just one convolution too far. One could argue more logically, that the first appearance of "Robot" was in old Slavonic around 700 AD or earlier. Perhaps a few thousand years earlier in its Sanskrit form. Though, surely, that is not the point here.

The point is that it was Čapek in 1921 who first applied it in the context of some kind of "soulless servant" and thus created its modern usage.

> According to this report the word “robot” first appeared in English in 1839. 1839!

There are some appearances even before that: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?direct_url=t1%3B%2Crob... But everything before 1920s seems to be a little more than just statistical/parsing error.

> […] but rather to a system, a “central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labour or service”

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what "robota" means in Czech. The most accurate English word i found for it is "socage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socage

A few years ago, I wrote a parser for some data in a loosely structured format. Its input was a google doc and its output was html, ready for copy+pasting into our CMS. The writers who produced the input took to calling it a 'robot' and the term stuck. As the sole 'technical' person in the company, I just had to suck it up and accept this horrendous misuse of the term. Unfortunately, it's not the only instance of this kind of thing; if you're a programmer working in a team consisting solely of non-programmers, you end up developing a pretty thick skin for all sorts of stuff, of which iceberg, language misuse is just the tip!

This is nothing compared to "Hoverboard". That thing doesn't even hover!

> the word robot comes from an old Church Slavonic word, robota, meaning “servitude”, “forced labor”, or “drudgery”

I'm not a native Russian speaker, but isn't the normal word for 'work' Rabota, and for 'worker' Rabotnik, without the negative connotation (forced labour, etc) implied by the article? At least that's how I also remember it from school.

So Robot just means 'worker', which IMHO makes a lot of sense.

It comes down to the root word "rob", meaning slave [1]. There is probably an o->a shift going from west to east slavic. From "rob" you get "robota", or work, and "robotnik" is "robota" + "-nik", meaning a person who performs robota. The other word you can see used is служба, or servitude, which comes with less slavery connotations. You would never call a slave "слуга", servants are paid, not owned.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rob#Czech - The page also lists several other slavic languages where it has the same meaning and has links to the proto-slavonic term

Interesting, thanks for the clarification!

The word "раб" (slave) certainly has a negative connotation.

Ornithopter -> RC helicopter -> Quad[copter] -> Multi-rotor -> Drone ...

which can be a $50 toy, a $5,000 photography machine, or $50 Million killing machine. bicycle -> cycle -> bike ... which can be a motorcycle too. Seems the trend is toward simple mono-syllabic words with high ambiguity in their meaning. Predict we end up with 'bot' when they are a part of everyday life.

I'm more annoyed at how certain popular kind of robots get removed from the class "robots" and given their own names. For example, people think of autonomous cars as their own thing even though all the technology behind autonomous driving came from robotics. Same for aerial robots -> "drones", etc.

"Washing machines", "toasters", "toilets", etc.

The common thread is that robots look like people or animals. No one would call a CNC machine a 'robotic machinist' but an industrial robotic arm is still a robot because it is visually similar to a human arm.

Wait, someone (Disney?) is defending a trademark on "droid"? That seems pretty silly. Then again, I do think of Star Wars when I think "droid", so maybe they have a good case for defending that trademark. Still, it seems to be close enough to being generic that we should fight it.

Yep. I'm pretty sure Motorola licensed it for the phone family of the same name. A huge number of pages advertising or even mentioning the Motorola Droid family have "DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm, Ltd." somewhere in the fine print.

Can you find popular use before Star Wars? If not, it's not silly. They've been actively protecting 'droid' for 40 years.

Apparently it first appeared on July 1952 in a story called "Robots of the World! Arise!" by Mari Wolf published in "If" magazine.

That is how trademarks works. Lots of simple words are trademarked...Apple, Windows, word,

But you can't trademark generic words in specific domains. You can't use the "Apple" trademark to sell produce or the "Windows" trademark to sell frames and glass panes. The Lindows lawsuit very nearly saw Microsoft lose the Windows trademark because "windows" is a generic term very closely associated to what the Windows OS is.

I can see a case for "droid" referring to generic electromechanical automatons, which are now more of a reality than they were 40 years ago.

As an aside, the "Robots Return" story is totally worth reading.

Language is constantly changing in all sorts of ways, and lots of people dislike that fact.

This might be slightly off topic, but I highly recommend the first chapter of R L Trask's Historical Linguistics [0] which is a very entertaining overview of how language changes over time.

He starts with the example of the word "bonk" which after 1986 meant "copulate" but prior to then meant nothing of the kind.

He also discusses the modern [ab]use of the word "hopefully", as in for example: "hopefully we'll be there in time for lunch":

"Here is what Mr Philip Howard, a well-known writer on language, has to say about it: he describes this use of hopefully as 'objectionable', 'ambiguous', 'obscure', 'ugly', 'aberrant', 'pretentious', and 'illiterate'; finally, playing his ace, he asserts that it was 'introduced by sloppy American academics'"

He then goes on to point out that "In spite of the vitriol which hopefully has attracted, then, this word provides us with a neat and elegant way of saying 'I hope and expect that', something that we couldn't say before without using a whole cumbersome string of words."

He goes on:

"Lest you suspect that my example of 'hopefully' might be an atypical case, let's look at something quite different. Consider these examples:

"My car is being repaired My house is being painted This problem is being discussed at today's meeting.

"Anything strange here? I doubt it - I don't think there's an English-speaker alive who regards these as other than normal.

"But it wasn't always so. Until the end of the eighteenth century, this particular construction did not exist in standard English, and an English-speaker would have had to say "My car is repairing", "My house is painting", and "This problem is discussing at today's meeting" - forms which are absolutely impossible for us now.

"... when a few innovating speakers began to say things like "My house is being painted", the linguistic conservatives of the day could not contain their fury. Veins bulging purply from their foreheads, the attacked the new construction as 'clumsy', 'illogical', 'confusing', and 'monstrous'.

"But their efforts were in vain. Today all those who objected to the 'illogical' and 'monstrous' new form are long dead, and the traditional form which they defended with such passion is dead with them."

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trasks-Historical-Linguistics-Rober... (this is the second edition - my copy is the first and I don't know if the first chapter is changed)

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