Isa

But before the company can begin mining operations, the ISA mandated that it complete a biological study of the region.

Everyone has their own way of explaining it. The ISA is the bridge, or the interface, between the hardware and the software. Or it’s the blueprint. Or it’s the computer’s DNA. These are helpful enough, as is the common comparison of an ISA to a language. “You and I are using English,” as [Calista Redmond] said to me at the conference. “That’s our ISA.” But it gets confusing. Software speaks in languages too—programming languages. That’s why [David Patterson] prefers dictionary or vocabulary. The ISA is less a specific language, more a set of generally available words.

They have come to think of the universities, the civil service, and the media – the old Althusserian ISAs – with its orthodoxy of egalitarianism, democracy and social constructionism, as the Cathedral; a quasi-religious structure that functions hegemonically to supress^([sic]) dissent.

If this compromised the expedition, it wasn’t exactly a shock – corporate sponsorship always seemed to lurk in the small print, and ISA had been authorising seafloor surveys for years.

Even "Liz" brought little to his memory; though he said: "The name does recall the fact of a sister. But why call her Isa?" "Just as easy as Liz, or any of the lot, Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess. Isa, that's, I think, a sort of a city name," Lee said, with a shadow of a smile.

It's an awkward name: Isamay, pronounced Is-a-may. Isa is my paternal grandmother's name (shortened from Isabel) and May my maternal grandmother's (it comes, somehow, from Margaret). The amalgamation is, as you see, strictly alphabetical. Life, I feel, would have been much easier if they had chosen Maybel.