"Practice address (slug)": how a piece of lead from 1886 ended up in a speech therapist's settings

For a while our panel asked speech therapists to enter a slug. Nobody complained, which is the worst part of this story.

The screen for switching on online booking had a field labelled "Practice address (slug)" (our panel is in Polish; the labels in this text are translated). If you typed something wrong, the program answered politely: "The address (slug) is lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, 3 to 40 characters". Polite and useless, like a customs officer explaining the rules in Latin.

Picture the scene. A speech therapist finishes work at six, sits down at the computer to finally switch on online bookings, and learns that a slug is required. In everyday English a slug is a garden pest without a shell, or a bullet. So the program was asking either for a snail or for something worse. We traced where the word came from. It had travelled a long way, from a completely different era, and, as it turned out, not alone.

Layer one: a piece of lead

In July 1886, in the printing works of the New York Tribune, the first commercially used Linotype machine went into service, the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler. Until then text for printing was set by hand, one piece of type at a time. The Linotype did something that bordered on magic at the time: it gathered the letter matrices into one line and cast, from hot metal, a whole line of text as a single piece of lead.

That piece was called a slug. One slug was one line of the newspaper, which the compositor held in his hand. Warm.

Layer two: newsroom nicknames

Since in the print shop a slug meant a line, in the newsroom the word moved up a floor. A slug came to mean the short name under which a text travelled through the production of the newspaper, from the reporter, through the editor, to the layout desk. Something like a nickname for the article, so that everyone knew which piece was being discussed before the headline was even settled.

Abbreviations carrying instructions were glued onto slugs: "AM" meant the morning edition, "CX" that it was a correction. The whole newsroom read that code in half a second. To anyone outside the newsroom it was gibberish.

That is, by the way, the definition of jargon in one sentence: a language that saves time inside and steals it outside.

Layer three: the internet takes over the inheritance

When the first systems for publishing text online were being built, they were built largely by people from newsrooms or for newsrooms. So they took a ready-made word. Today a slug is the readable ending of an address: in mentai.pl/gabinet/gabinet-anny the slug is "gabinet-anny".

And so the chain closed: a bar of lead from 1886, an article's nickname in an American newspaper, the ending of a web address, a field in the settings of a speech therapy practice in Poznań, one hundred and forty years later.

None of the links in that chain was a mistake. Only the last one was, because only there did the person on the other side have never seen a Linotype.

Half of computing is a print shop

Once we knew where the slug had come from, we started checking its neighbours. It turned out it had arrived with its whole family. A good share of the words programs say to you every day are compositors dressed up as computer scientists.

Font comes from the French fonte, a casting. Because type was cast, from the same lead as the slug. When a program asks "which font would you like", it is really asking "which mould shall we cast from".

Leading, the space between lines, is pronounced "ledding", from lead, the metal. In the eighteenth century the compositor slipped strips of lead between the lines so the text could "breathe". Today a slider in your editor does the same thing, only without the lead and without the compositor.

Upper case and lower case are literally the upper and lower case: two wooden trays on the compositor's desk where the type lay. Capitals in the upper one, because they were needed less often, small letters in the lower one, within reach. The word case in this sense has been recorded since 1588. So when a program asks you for "a password with a capital letter", it is asking you to reach into the upper tray. From 1588.

Boilerplate, the word programmers use for ready-made text pasted in without changes, a legal footer for example, came from boiler plates. At the end of the nineteenth century press agencies sent small newspapers ready columns and advertisements cast on metal plates. The plates looked like the sheet metal used for steam boilers, so that is what they were called. The terms and conditions you scroll through without reading are, literally, boiler plate. Hard to think of a more honest name.

Cliché and stereotype come from here too. A stereotype in the print shop was a plate cast from a whole composed page, so it could be printed many times without setting it again. The French cliché, recorded since 1825, is probably the sound the mould made hitting molten metal. Click. A repeatable plate, a repeatable phrase. When someone says a text is "clichéd", they are quoting the sound of a foundry.

So when you read about fonts, leading and capitals in a program, you are talking to a sixteenth-century compositor. The slug in the speech therapist's field was no exception. It was just the relative who turned up to the family gathering uninvited and in overalls.

The rest is a ship, a carriage and a cupboard

Not everything came from the print shop. Some of the words programs treat as obvious have even stranger home addresses.

Log, the record of events a program quietly keeps in the background. It is short for logbook, a ship's journal. And the ship's journal is named after the log, a wooden block. Sailors threw a board on a knotted line over the stern and counted how many knots ran through their hands in half a minute. Hence "knots" as a ship's speed, and hence the book in which it was written down. A description of the method appears in a seafarers' manual from 1574. When a program says it has "written the event to the log", it is saying it threw a block of wood into the water.

Dashboard. Originally the board at the front of a carriage, protecting passengers from the mud the horses dashed up with their hooves. The word is recorded from 1847, in a description of a sleigh. Then it moved to the car, because the board stayed, only now there was an engine behind it instead of a horse. Then someone screwed dials to it. Today a "dashboard" in a program is a screen with statistics, and its real name is "the mud board".

Bug, a fault in a program. Thomas Edison used the word in a letter of 13 November 1878, writing about the small faults that "show themselves" in an invention. Sixty-nine years later, in 1947, Grace Hopper's team found a real moth in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer. They taped it into the logbook with the note "first actual case of bug being found". The moth is in a museum to this day. So when a program has "a bug", strictly speaking it has a moth.

Daemon is what computer scientists call a program that works in the background with no human involved. The name was coined in 1963 at MIT, after Maxwell's demon, an imaginary creature from physics that sorts molecules. So when at midnight the practice's "automation" sends appointment reminders, formally a daemon is doing it. We do not say that in the panel. For obvious reasons.

Cookies. You have probably seen a cookie banner several times today. The name was coined in 1994 by Lou Montulli of Netscape, after the "magic cookie", programmers' jokey term for a chunk of data a program receives and hands back unchanged. In other words, the whole of Europe has been clicking "accept cookies" for years because of one man's joke in California.

Spam. From the tinned meat Spam and from the 1970 Monty Python sketch in which Vikings sing "Spam, Spam, Spam" until nothing else can be heard. Unwanted mail works the same way. It is one of the few words on this list that names the thing exactly as it looks.

Breadcrumbs, the trail "Settings › Online booking › Slots" at the top of the screen. From Hansel and Gretel, who dropped crumbs to find their way back home. As the tale goes, the birds ate them and the children ended up with the witch. Not the best advertisement for navigation, but the name stuck.

Words that only look ordinary

You might think the everyday words would be safer. Sometimes they are worse, because they look like plain English and come from somewhere else entirely.

Application. Before touchscreen phones, an application was something you filled in to get a job or a place at university, and before that it meant diligence. Today a speech therapist "installs an application". Not in order to be hired.

Your session has expired. A message that sounds like a court or a parliament. Session comes from the Latin sedere, to sit. In a program it means you sat still too long and the program stopped believing it was still you. It should say: "You've been inactive, sign in again". Instead it warns you about a session, like a clerk of the court.

Invalid token. A token is the thing you get at a cloakroom or an arcade. The program is telling you that your token does not match the number, it just forgot to mention where the cloakroom is.

Dedicated. A dedicated server is a server set aside for one thing. Outside computing you dedicate a book or a song to someone close. "A dedicated module for speech therapists" therefore sounds like a module with an inscription on the first page: "To dear Barbara, with warm regards".

Functionality. The word that appears when "function" seemed too short to someone. A program does not have functionality. It has functions. Functionality is a quality of a good chair.

Wizard. The screen that leads you step by step is named after a sorcerer. "Run the setup wizard" means, more or less, "summon a magician to dress your program". At least it is honest: something is going to happen and you are not expected to understand how.

By default. The phrase comes from law and finance: a default is a failure to act, a debt not paid. "By default the reminder goes by SMS" literally says the reminder goes by SMS because nobody did anything about it. Which happens to be true, but nobody hears it that way. The program simply does it that way until you tell it otherwise. And that is what it should say.

For balance: there are names that worked, and not since yesterday. Trash, clipboard, folder and plug-in are words nobody has to explain, though each of them is a borrowed picture. It can be done. You just have to want the person on the other side of the screen to understand at once.

Our own display case of fossils

Since we had started looking, we went through the whole panel. Below is the real list of what we cut: on the left what the program said until recently, on the right what it says now (labels translated from the Polish interface).

Notice one pattern. Not one of these words was difficult. All of them are understandable, to us. Jargon rarely sounds like jargon to the person who wrote it. It sounds like precision.

In fairness we will add that behind the scenes, where the client never looks, we still talk about "leads", which is what salespeople call the people who asked about an offer. It is spelled exactly like the metal, but it is a different word: from "to lead". The compositor would take offence, and we have it on the list to cut anyway.

Why this happens at all

The names in a program are born at the same moment as the feature, and the same person writes them. That person has the whole construction in their head, so "panel state" is, to them, an exact and economical description. The trouble is that it describes the thing from their side of the screen.

On the other side someone has twenty minutes between one appointment and the next and wants to know who has not paid yet. That is not the same person and they do not have the same map in their head.

That is why names have to be read in the finished program, calmly, whole screens at a time, and not approved one by one at the moment of writing, when each of them seems obvious.

Jargon has defenders, and surprising ones

The funniest part came during the clean-up. We changed "Copy panel state" to "Copy the list of steps" and our own automatic checker lit up red.

We have a set of tests that make sure important things do not disappear from the program by accident. One of them made sure there was a "Copy panel state" button in the panel. We pulled the old word out of the interface and the test decided something had broken, because it was still looking for the old name.

In other words: the jargon had managed to set like concrete in a place where nobody was looking for it. We had to cut it out twice. Once from what you see, and once from what makes sure you see it. A bit like Grace Hopper's moth: the fault itself was small, but you had to open the machine.

The rule we took from this

A simple rule, and it demands one uncomfortable thing: you have to walk through your own product like a stranger who does not know a single abbreviation. We now do it after every batch of changes.

What you can take from this for yourself

If you are choosing software for your practice, you have a very cheap test in your hands. Switch on the trial version and read aloud the three screens you will use most often. Do not judge the features, judge the words. If along the way you meet a slug, a snail or a cloakroom token, you now know where they came from.

One strange word is a trifle, it happens to everyone. A dozen on one screen means something else: that nobody outside the team that built the program has ever read it aloud. And if nobody read it, then nobody checked it either, nobody who, like you, has twenty minutes between appointments.

PS. This post has its own slug in its address: "strange-words-in-software". In addresses it is allowed. In the panel it no longer is.

Frequently asked questions

What is a slug in a web address?

It is the readable ending of an address that describes the content, for example "gabinet-anny" in mentai.pl/gabinet/gabinet-anny. The word comes from printing, where it meant a line of text cast in lead, and then from newsrooms, where it was the short name of an article in production. In MentAI it is now called "Name in your booking link" and next to it you see a preview of the finished link.

Why does practice software use strange words?

Usually not out of bad will. The names are written by the person building the program, and to them they are transparent: they know what they mean because they made them up. Jargon stays wherever nobody has read the screen through the eyes of the person who has to work with it.

Are "application", "dashboard" and "session" bad words?

They are not bad, they are somebody else's. Each has its own history and was precise in its original world. The trouble starts when a program uses them on a person who does not know that world and gives no hint. If "your session has expired" is followed by "sign in again", nobody comes to any harm.

Does renaming things confuse people who are already used to the old names?

That is why we change them in batches and describe them in Updates (in Polish), instead of swapping one a week. A name that is understood the first time saves more than a one-off readjustment costs.

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