Language Investigation #1

There are dozens of communities I belong to. Primarily, I’m a member of the academic community, the CSU community. I say “primarily” because currently it takes up most of my time. We use words like “credit hour”, “course load”, “GPA”, all of which have something to do with the classes we are taking and how it is affecting our grade point average.

Other communities I am involved with include the Rocky Mountain Collegian and College Avenue Magazine. These journalistic and publishing endeavors definitely have their own language in order to communicate effectively between the news reporters, designers, editors and photographers. Currently, I’m a photographer and managing editor. Words I commonly use include “CMYK” “JPEG” “Make sure you .tiff that image”, “We need to sit down for budget” “The slug on that photo is”.

CMYK refers to the color format on an image while working with in Adobe Photoshop. Photos need to be in CMYK for printing purposes so the printer can read the right colors. JPEG is a image format while saving for the web and .tiff is for saving an image to be printed. Budget is when the editors discuss what will be in the paper the following day. This meeting takes about and hour or two and maps out everything that the next day’s paper will contain. The slug on an assignment refers to how the image while be filed on the computer. That way, everyone knows the title and where to find it. If I shoot a basketball game and the slug is meant to be “020809_mbb_texas” but I file it as “BBtexas”, it will make life harder for the designers who layout the pages at night and place the photo.

“Insider” status I think is relative, but there is something to be said for knowing all the steps to a dance. For the magazine, we have to train everyone who works for us to understand the language that revolves around the publication. A designer would never know what the “font library” was is we didn’t show them on the computer. A photographer wouldn’t know the “DPI” for an image (resolution) unless they were taught and shown that for magazine printing the dpi needs to be at 300 resolution and for newsprint 200 dpi is just fine.

While the language I use at work is casual, it is of course technical. That is not the case for how I interact with my roommates, friends or professors. I use very casual language with my roommates (unless of course I’m angry or annoyed, and then become quite snippy and laconic). We have to use words that talk about bills, shoveling walk ways, mowing the lawn, “swiffering” the floor etc.