Who knows the origin of the term "beta"

[wildhiker]

This is really bugging me. I keep seeing on this forum, in magazines, etc., the use of the term "beta" to mean "information", as in "does anyone have beta on trail xxx". Beta is the name of the second letter in the Greek alphabet. Does anyone know how/when/where/why it came to mean "information"? Doesn't make any sense to me. And it seems silly to me.
-Phil

[rlown]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(climbing)

And this:

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum ... -word-beta

I'll spare you the fish reference.

How's that for beta about beta..

[wildhiker]

Thanks for the links, Russ. Now I am sure that the term is silly! Can we banish the beta? How about using a good English word abbreviation, like "info"? Same length, flows off the tongue just as well, and has a clear meaning.
-Phil

[rlown]

Glad to help! I know a lot of stuff that is useless.

[Tom_H]

Beta is the second letter in the Greek alphabet. If a product is in beta testing, it is in its second round of product development. This is often considered a final round before production level release.

A primary (from Latin primus, meaning first) source of information is a firsthand account of something. When someone posts a TR on HST, that information is from a primary (firsthand) source. Once you read that information and have it in your mind, it is now secondhand (or beta) information.

So that's the technical explanation. I silently roll my eyes at it. Language changes. Young people have their idiosyncrasies that come and go. My generation at one time said groovy to anything and everything. I never hear it anymore and I don't hear the few survivors of my parents' generation say, That's the cat's meow, either.

[Jimr]

I'm still trying to figure out why my generation thought "Hot" and "Cool" meant the same thing.

[rlown]

Cat's Meow. The penultimate document on brewing. http://realbeer.com/spencer/cats-meow/top_page.html I know Tom, it was a stretch, but you brought it up..

Also, we never did beta testing.. we did Human factors testing, with cameras and interviews to tune user interfaces and reactions to layouts. Given we were doing that in the early '90's I was pretty proud of what we were doing.

[Tom_H]

Cat's Meow. The penultimate document on brewing. http://realbeer.com/spencer/cats-meow/top_page.html

[Wandering Daisy]

"beta" has been used for over 20 years in rock climbing, particularly sport climbing. It is very ingrained in the climbing nomenclature. May be simply becasue most sport climbers are young people. Slang language does not necessairly have any logical meaning. Someone says it, and it spreads. Nobody analyzes the derivation.

[longri]

The story I've always heard is that the late Jack Mileski called it that because some people love to spew unsolicited information about a climb, playing back the details of a route like a Sony Betamax videotape machine.

Jack was in his early 20s when he used the word that way, but it's not really young person slang, at least not anymore. Most rock climbers say beta, regardless of their age. Saying "info" would just seem weird. It would be like asking how much info you gathered in your scientific experiment.

And of course it isn't just climber slang anymore. I'm a little surprised it hasn't been added to standard dictionaries yet.