Confession Of A Never Techie

I have always savored words.

They are like little scalpels.

They are like Hersey's chocolate sauce.

They are like a herd of goats sniffing you on the trail and chewing on your shoes.

They are magic and fluid and interstitial.

 They are so useful that I could keep going.

But I won't.

That's all humanities stuff - right?

Right, but.

One of my favorite words - concatenate - I learned from one of the few programming languages that I was ever able to understand and code in.

It was called PL/1 and it never went anywhere because it was viewed by the non-IBM Employee Community as an IBM plot to take over computing.

As best as I was ever able to surmise it was a racehorse, un-clunky version of FORTRAN merged with a COBOL that didn't crash when compiling because of a comma.

I loved it.

It had a command: "concatenate".

"What does "concatenate" mean I said to no one in particular.

I had a degree in History and English so one would have thought that concatenate would be on the tip of my tongue with my every thought and my every written sentence, but it wasn't.

So, I looked it up.

What a powerful word.

What a powerful command.

And all invoked with this symbol: "ll".