There are words that emerge because the world changes. “Internet” was once jargon, so much so that George W. Bush had trouble saying it (OK, low bar). So was “software.” 

Over time, these terms ceased to sound technical because they described genuinely new realities with precision and elegance.

And then there are words like “compute.”

As in other cases, the news media has adopted it slavishly. Somewhere in the last few years, Silicon Valley executives, AI researchers, consultants and policymakers collectively decided that “computing power” was too cumbersome, human, and understandable.

So they amputated the language. Now we are told that nations must compete for “compute.” Startups “lack compute.” Governments seek “sovereign compute.”

Venture capitalists solemnly warn of “compute bottlenecks,” as though Moses himself descended from Sinai carrying NVIDIA chips. Sorry, I meant “carrying compute.”

Linguistics purists will insist that any change is simply evolution. But some changes are vile, and preserving clarity in language is among the building blocks of civilization.

Plus, it’s just a hideous word, committing the cardinal sin of transitioning from verb to noun. Imagine if a joke were “amuse,” and the hungry lacked “eat.”

Not all technical shorthand is inherently bad. Every industry develops compressed language. Lawyers “litigate.” Physicists need “quarks.” Economists need “inflation.”

Software engineers genuinely need distinctions between “hardware,” “software,” “memory,” and “processing.”

Good technical language narrows meaning. It sacrifices familiarity in exchange for precision.

But bad jargon does the opposite: It’s basically unnecessary. Gotta say, you see more than a hint of that when journalists misspell the “lead” paragraph as “lede” and invent terms like “copy” (the text), “nut graf” (the context “boilerplate”), and “kicker” (the ending that functions like a kick in the gut).

But rarely does useless jargon enter the wider language.

With tech, English has endured several such invasions already. “Interface” once sounded intolerably mechanical when imported from engineering into ordinary speech. “Input” transformed human opinions into the equivalent of data fed into a machine.

“Leverage” escaped physics and became consultant shorthand for “use” (or, more bizarrely still, “debt”). “Bandwidth” mutated from telecommunications into a way for exhausted professionals to describe their availability, like a human Wi-Fi router.

First comes the ugly specialist usage. Then ambitious professionals adopt it to sound current. Then management consultants spread it like an invasive species. Finally, the public gives up resisting.

“Compute” is the latest -- and if you want to leverage my input, the greatest -- scourge.

Nobody outside this world naturally would want to say “compute.” Human beings say “computing power,” “processing capacity,” “servers,” “machines,” or simply “computers.” Those phrases evoke something tangible.

“Compute,” by contrast, floats in the air like a synthetic protein substitute for language itself.

When an AI executive says a company possesses “more compute,” what does that actually mean? Chips? Energy?  Capital expenditure? Cloud access? GPU-hours? Time?

The beauty of the word -- from the perspective of corporate bureaucracies and investors -- is that it collapses all these things into one sleek, frictionless abstraction.

It sounds scientific without requiring specificity -- increasingly, the hallmark of elite professional language, which often functions not to clarify thought but to evade it.

To say “compute” signals membership in the Silicon Valley club. It demonstrates familiarity with the discourse of AI scaling laws, venture capital, and “hyperscaler” infrastructure.

Like much jargon, the word functions socially before it functions intellectually — which helps explain why such language spreads so quickly.

Every professional tribe develops verbal handshakes — words that separate insiders from outsiders. There is a small thrill in hearing an opaque term and immediately grasping its meaning while others remain slightly confused. 

One can almost watch the “micro-aggression” of satisfaction flickering across the faces of conference-goers thrilled to share a kind of priestly status by virtue of taking the same absurd word seriously.

Silicon Valley’s version is especially aggressive because the industry sees itself not merely as successful, but historically transformative. Its jargon therefore acquires an almost theological quality.

If anyone doubts this God complex, they should listen to Peter Thiel, who speaks as if ordinary democratic systems are obsolete or inadequate and “frames” technological elites as the real “drivers” of history.

Good Lord! Now I am using jargon!

Why are we so weak? Is it a lack of compute? Or have I joined the priesthood myself?

One thing is clear:The more machines are sounding human, the more humans are sounding artificial.

That may just be the point. Is anything truly real?