Some Tech Neologisms Stay the Course, Others Can’t Make the Grade
On the rise of “hill-climbing”
Neologisms are evidence that a language remains vital and fecund, evolving toward new insights and possibilities. Whether we believe that technology drives change or whether we think it’s less a causal force than an agent of economic imperatives (such as increased productivity), we can readily see that many new words embraced by the English language come from technology.
Consequently, we should not be surprised that Silicon Valley, given its provenance as the global center of gravity for the technology industry, has birthed more than its fair share of neologisms during the past several decades.
Some of these new words have escaped from labs and whiteboards and roamed through boardrooms and city streets, while others have failed to achieve wider circulation. A sufficient number of these neologisms have made the grade, however, for us to acknowledge that the technology industry, and Silicon Valley by implication, has changed the contours and dimensions of the English language, transcending their technical origins. The words downtime and reboot are two examples.
The foregoing was prologue to today’s discussion of a Wall Street Journal article on the advent and spread of the term “hill-climbing,” which is used most often as a compound noun. The Wall Street Journal explains that hill-climbing, in its current usage, originated as a “niche term of art in machine-learning research,” but “is proving a handy metaphor for talking about growth and threatening to cross over into wider business-speak.” The growth to which the term refers can be professional or personal, and it usually entails getting gradually better at something.
One of the Silicon Valley habitués quoted in the article suggests that hill-climbing is just a “universal term for the act of improving.” That makes me question whether we need to enlist the term as the latest member of the not-so-exclusive English-language club. If we already have a perfectly serviceable word — more than one, actually — filling the assigned role, do we really need another one?
Scaling the Linguistic Heights
It’s not an idle question. Communication is important. We need to precisely articulate what we’re trying to express. If we don’t, how can we expect others to understand our meaning and respond appropriately?
Hill-climbing — a transposition from the recreational realm of hiking — had a specific denotation in the context of early research in cognitive science and AI. As the Wall Street Journal article explains:
The phrase dates back to the early days of AI and cognitive science, when researchers used it to describe a methodical step-by-step algorithm that yields predictable improvement through trial and error—think of the game “hot and cold.” In the context of AI, it has a specific technical meaning. Like rats in a Skinner box being conditioned to get food or stop pain, AI models hill-climb in a process similar to reinforcement learning, tweaking their parameters based on feedback.
From Wikipedia, we get the following entry on hill climbing, which it does not hyphenate:
It is an iterative algorithm that starts with an arbitrary solution to a problem, then attempts to find a better solution by making an incremental change to the solution. If the change produces a better solution, another incremental change is made to the new solution, and so on until no further improvements can be found.
In that context, you can see that the terminology had clear meaning. In leaving the research lab, “hill-climbing” is subject to abuse and degradation. It has novelty value outside the lab — the shimmering currency of all new coinages — but the popular appeal can lead to indiscriminate use. When we say a word is used indiscriminately, we’re saying it’s being used reflexively, unthinkingly. These former neologisms, having shot to flavor-of-the-month fame, are in danger of becoming hackneyed markers on a buzzword-bingo board, identifiable in future years, like the sound of eighties synthesizers, by their bygone quaintness.
Does “hill-climbing” have the legs — I beg your indulgence for my punning — to stay the course? I’m not sure whether it does. I think it should enjoy its time in the limelight before ambling into the sunset.