
Robot Is A Hijacked Word - mayava
http://rodneybrooks.com/robot-is-a-hijacked-word/
======
skywhopper
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.

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

Or as I call it, twepurdgerruchxtegused

ken

~~~
felipemnoa
Google sure is fast:

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=twepurdgerruchxtegused)

~~~
HenryBemis
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!)

------
interfixus
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.

~~~
stevula
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](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot)

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

~~~
stevula
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.

~~~
interfixus
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.

------
PhasmaFelis
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.

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

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

~~~
HenryBemis
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????)

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

------
satori99
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](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=computer)

~~~
huxley
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan)

~~~
satori99
She was recently portrayed in the film 'Hidden Figures', right? I haven't seen
it, but it looks quite interesting.

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

------
SagelyGuru
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.

------
helb
> 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...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?direct_url=t1%3B%2Crobot%3B%2Cc0)
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socage)

------
oneeyedpigeon
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!

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

------
flohofwoe
> 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.

~~~
Asooka
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](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

~~~
flohofwoe
Interesting, thanks for the clarification!

------
stillsut
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.

------
blt
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.

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

------
jordigh
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.

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

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

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

------
sjcsjc
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...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trasks-Historical-Linguistics-Robert-
Mccoll/dp/0340927658) (this is the second edition - my copy is the first and I
don't know if the first chapter is changed)

