The BBC checks in with a story about how computer security is threatened because computer users are threatened by the language the experts use.

Well, duh. If ever jargon was created that was clearly meant to be used only in email, that was it. Spam has that nice, pronounceable quality to it. Phishing, not so much.

What do you use to catch a phisher? B8?

But look, this isn’t entirely our fault. We don’t get to make the language, remember? In our community, “hacker” is still a term of respect — meanwhile in the rest of the country people still think that word is somewhere between “terrorist” and “child molester” on the list of things you don’t let your babies grow up to be. We used that word for years, and then Time came along and blew it away with one cover story.

Granted, “spam” is all our fault. To think that Monty Python has gotten words into everyday use….

But here’s the deal the geek community will make with the Muggles. We’ll stop speaking to you in Perl. And you’ll stop cherishing our lingo more than we do. We don’t care that you’ve got a 2.4 GHz processor that can channel 3.9 teraquads of dilithium into your flux capacitor. If computers are still needlessly complex — and they are — face facts and realize that this is true because most people want them to be. Because otherwise, they’ll have to rely on their knowledge of car engines to show off how technically erudite they are. Or they’ll stop having convenient excuses not to become minimally computer literate.