Tuesday, October 05, 2004

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Jargonwatch: Unpacking In the last few months (I write in late 2004), I am more often hearing the term "unpacking" used to mental, not physical, endeavors. As in "this strange passage from the historian Josephus requires some unpacking". I can't recall when I first heard the term used this way, but it seems no more than a few years ago. The first couple of times I heard it, I thought it a clever metaphor: a sentence or passage was so dense with meaning that it had to be unpacked to be comprehensible to the ordinary reader (sort of like un-compressing a .Zip file). As is so often the case, it is now being over-used. I think because it lends an aura of intellectual authority to the speaker/writer, but in a oblique, modest-seeming way. I am seeing uses now that apply not to a particularly difficult passage, but generically to any topic requiring further discussion, explanation or analysis. I even heard a city official quoted on the radio to the effect that "the proposal sounds promising, though it still requires unpacking". Just search for the phrase "requires some unpacking", and you will get good examples. Hmmm, when I search for "requires unpacking", most of the results refer to un-compressing files. I wonder if the increasing general familiarity with the notion of file compression is indeed the inspiration for this metaphor? I'm guessing it isn't, that there are some examples which predate the PC-era, but that general familiarity with the file-compression concept has made the ground fertile for much broader adoption of this peculiar expression. 7:39:42 PM    comment []