i tore myself away from the Internet long enough to enter a bookstore recently. You know the cool thing about bookstores? You couldn't download a home page in them even if you wanted to. You're forced to open literal pages in realtime -- instant gratification! No waiting! No bitmaps! Gee, I kind of miss that. Even if you're a totally wired cyberlibertarian netizen who only reads manuals, zines, e-mail manifestos and the more amusing chunks of code, you can pick up books and put them down by the dozens in less time than it would take you to sneer at a single Web site in its vast entirety. Call me a Luddite, but it seems to me that the analog approach to data still puts you ahead of the game, despite the Information Revolution, which is about to put virtual cake in the mouths of every starving baby everywhere, any day now. In a bookstore, you will never see the words "DNS entry not found." A book is either in stock or it's not. But a Web site is always in stock, somewhere. The cyberwarehouse is just lost to us from time to time, that's all. Call it a digital downside. Anyway, I was offline, out of the house, browsing through prose at my local independent bookseller, when I came across a brand new book, "Wired Style," subtitled "Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age From the Editors of Wired." Hey, I figured, if I can master the principles of English usage as ordained by the high priests of Wired, well, golly, the world's probably my oyster. So I bought the darn thing. Now, I buy Wired every month, and find myself throwing it across the room more frequently than would perhaps be considered normal. Its peculiar combination of New Journalism (or "Way New Journalism," as its editors term it in "Wired Style"), virtual boosterism and enthusiastic incomprehensibility make it attractive and infuriating at the same time. I still don't know, for example, what Wired regular Nicholas Negroponte does exactly. I know he's some kind of cyberguru at Media Lab, but he seems to spend most of his time flying all over the world telling various world leaders that they don't really know what's going on, Digital Revolutionwise. Do world leaders pay him to do this, or is this some kind of charitable impulse on his part? And every other issue, it seems, tells me once again that the term "cyberspace" was coined by writer William Gibson. Hey, editors of Wired? Everybody knows this now. Let it go. William Gibson himself is sick of hearing about it. They'll probably put on his gravestone: "Guy who coined term 'cyberspace.'" And he'll spin, how he'll spin. "Wired Style" is an attempt to codify the cockeyed cockiness of Wired. If you purchase this manual to learn, say, the difference between "that" and "which," or why splitting infinitives is a mortal sin, you're out of luck. What this book mainly is, is a glossary. If you ever need to know the proper way to refer to an asynchronous transfer mode, or what annoying little e-mail acronyms (LOTL, RTFM, ATA, etc.) really mean, this tome is your meat. What really gripes me about this book -- well, there are a couple of things. First of all, there's the packaging. It's not just a book, you see, oh no. There's a little red box from which "Wired Style" slides out. Two steps where only one is needed! The entire prose unit looks like a coffee-table book, shrunken by some unspeakable experiment. And the book itself is bound with wire, printed on fluorescent green paper. Every time I crack the goddam spine, I have a sudden yen for Gatorade. What's wrong with an ordinary yellowing crumbling paperback you can stuff in your pocket until it falls apart? Do you want us to worship your packaging, or read the goddam contents? That's my main quibble with Wired. And here's the second thing. This book does not discourage us from recognizing the legitimacy of the term "cyberword." As near as I can tell, the new cyberlanguage, like Ebonics, is just jazzed-up English. Only cyberlanguage has a dead ear. Do we really need words and phrases like "in-your-face," "post-Gutenberg" or "non-linear, networked editing?" Do they even mean anything? Do you think I enjoy attaching "multi," "mega," or "hyper" to nouns and verbs for no apparent reason? But as a text-based-cyber-content-provider, what choice do I have? I can only fall to my virtual knees and plead, "Look, I'm just a semi-wired neo-Luddite (defined, page 28) trying to make a buck in the new marketplace (undefined). Can't somebody think of me as a niche market, ripe for the plucking? Give me something to read that doesn't contain an acronym. Give me something to read that doesn't contain the words "bandwidth," "app," "signal-to-noise" or "download." Is that too much to ask? Feb. 20, 1997

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