Agnostic? I don't know...

Since when has the word agnostic changed its meaning?

I work in the technology sector and you see this phrase everywhere these days: platform agnostic. It’s used to mean that it doesn’t matter which hardware or telephony platform you own, the solution in question will work with it. Go back a few years, and the accepted phrase was platform independent – used for software that is independent of any platform constraint, therefore can run on any platform. 

Look up agnostic in the dictionary and you’ll see it means unknown or unknowable and it relates specifically to the existence, or otherwise, of God. What these misguided corporate marketers are actually saying, is we don’t know, not it doesn’t matter. And I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

So why reinvent the word agnostic to replace a perfectly acceptable term which everybody understood?

I found this article which describes the take-up of the term platform agnostic in recent years. It says what’s happened, but it doesn’t explain why. So I offer this as a thought; every marketer seeks to differentiate. Somewhere, a few years ago perhaps, in a shiny air-conditioned unit on a landscaped Silicon Valley campus, in a 6 foot square cubicle decorated with a thousand colourful giveaway gadgets, gismos and graphics designed to show what a quirky, creative individual the occupant is – a quirky, creative individual without a full grasp of the English language coined what he determined was a new and different way of describing an old and well established concept. His colleagues, none apparently in possession of an English dictionary, congratulated said quirky, creative individual on his quirky creation, and the phrase was launched on the techno-marketing universe.

And I don’t know, but somewhere, in a damp crypt in deepest rural England perhaps, an ancient scholar, a teacher of Latin, a lover of language, from the first or second century, turned silently in his grave.

22nd July 2011