code is the new paste

Paste is such a great word: it's involved in the naming of many diverse foods, such as pasta, pesto, pastries, pate, pastilles, pastrami, Filipino pastillas, Moroccan pastilla and Cornish pasties. And tomato paste. These all have a pressing or mixing process as part of their construction, which ended up being the main part of their name.

In the modern workplace, I see code as having a similarly important role in naming stuff:

• source code is the goto example, with coders and low-code and code-free all derived from this meaning;
• codec is shorthand for coder-decoder, the pair of tools responsible for encoding sound and video into a transportable sequence (and out again);
• encryption codes are used for encrypting data into a secret code so that others cannot understand them;
• ?diagnosis codes such as?ICD-10-CM and procedural codes such as CPT give doctors and their entourage some standard terms that they can all agree on;
• a code of practice sets out how professionals are expected to comply with regulations and legal obligations;
• an ethical code goes a bit further than that;
• dress code is what we are meant to wear to work (and elsewhere). And finally
• code-switching is what we do when we find ourselves outside our normal social habitat, for example my family accuse me of code-switching when I'm attempting to elicit a quote from a visiting tradesman.

All these examples are as diverse as the foods above, but they share a common aspect of codifying or standardizing the process, tool or discourse in question, which of course has been such a prominent feature of recent human history.

The above images were taken from Wikipedia under Creative commons licence. The image owners are SKopp, antmang, Palosirkka, jytyl, Evan-Amos, nyaa_birdies_perch, David Johnson, and?????

#code #linguistics #semantics #healthdata #cooking #encryption #codecs #ethics #dresscode