Specialist Vocabulary
249Then, through another similarity-of-function metaphor (i.e. COMPUTER
SOFTWARE IS A WORKER) founded on the above-presented conceptual
frame (with the emphasis on BEING IN CONTROL OF THE OPERATION OF),
driver (or device driver) became used in the figurative sense of ‘a piece of
software that enables a computer to control and operate an input-output
device or another peripheral’, as in video card driver, printer driver, etc.
Exactly as in the above-discussed case of reader, conceptualizing abstract
SOFTWARE in terms of a concrete WORKER (i.e. a DRIVER) conforms to the
CONCRETE Æ ABSTRACT path of metaphorization pointed out by Lakoff
and Johnson (1980).
Unincidentally, a terminological synonym to driver (or device driver)
is handler (or device handler), which is another M.E. word whose original
(late 14th-century) sense, loosely applicable to PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS
(‘one who handles’), became fully professional/occupational (e.g. ‘one
who holds and sets on a dog in a fight or contest’ or ‘a police officer who
is in charge of a trained dog’) in the Modern English period, as seen from
the following contexts provided by the OED:
1398 “Chaungers handlers of syluer.”
1825 “The [...] dogs darted at the [...] lion, amid the horrid din of the
cries of their handlers.”Hardly surprisingly, handler (as in disk drive handler) has acquired its
computer-specific sense synonymous to that of driver through a very
similar conceptualization (i.e. a WORKER who is IN CONTROL OF the
BEHAVIOUR of an ANIMAL). Interestingly, there is another variation on the
software-specific sense of handler, where the personified software is in
control not as much of hardware (which is CONCRETE), but of other
software (which is ABSTRACT). This even more abstract specialist sense of
handler is ‘a special software routine that controls a certain function’, as
exemplified by error handler (‘a software routine that controls and reports
on an error when it occurs’), or protocol handler.^57
Another specialist computer technology term that originally belonged
to the lexical (semantic) field of PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS is M.E.
controller, whose very first OED-recorded sense is ‘one who keeps a
counter-roll so as to check a treasurer or person in charge of accounts’
(followed by: ‘a household officer whose duty was primarily to check
expenditure, and so to manage in general, a steward; also an officer having
similar duties in various public offices’), as evidenced by the following:
(^57) Its anthropomorphic characteristics are stressed in Lam (2001: 34).