Disemvoweling, disemvowelling (British and Commonwealth English), or disemvowelment is writing a piece of text with all the vowel letters removed. [1] Disemvoweling is often used in band and company names. It used to be a common feature of SMS language where space was costly. [1]
The word disemvowel is a pun and portmanteau combining vowel and disembowel . [1] One of the earliest attestations of the word dates back to the 1860s. [2] The 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce also uses it: "Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled". [3]
A technique dubbed splat out was used by Usenet moderators to prevent flamewars, by substituting a "splat" (i.e., asterisk) for some letters, often the vowels, of highly charged words in postings. Examples include Nazi →N*z*, evolution →*v*l*t**n, gun control →g*n c*ntr*l. "The purpose is not to make the word unrecognizable but to make it a mention rather than a use." [4] The term "disemvoweling"—attested from 1990 [5] —was occasionally used for the splat-out of vowels. [4] [6]
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used the vowel-deletion technique in 2002 for internet forum moderation on her blog Making Light. [7] This was termed disemvoweling by Arthur D. Hlavaty later in the same thread. [8]
Nielsen Hayden joined the group blog Boing Boing as community manager in August 2007,[ citation needed ] when it re-enabled comments on its posts, [9] and implemented disemvoweling. [10] Gawker Media sites adopted disemvoweling as a moderation tool in August 2008. [11] [12] On 30 October 2008, Time magazine listed disemvoweling as #42 of their "Top 50 Inventions of 2008". [13]
Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing , said of the practice, "the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized." [14] Also, Boing Boing producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to types of behavior that are unacceptable. [15] [ needs update ]
After Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, [16] one of his ideas was to install a feature that allowed a reader to "disemvowel" an article they didn't enjoy, the idea being that another reader would have to pay to reinstate the vowels. Shailesh Prakash, the newspaper's chief product and technology officer, said "the idea didn't go far". [17]
In July 2008, New York Times reporter Noam Cohen criticized disemvoweling as a moderation tool, citing a June 2008 dispute about the deletion of all posts on Boing Boing that mentioned sex columnist Violet Blue [ citation needed ]. In the Boing Boing comment threads resulting from this controversy, Nielsen Hayden used the disemvoweling technique. Cohen noted that disemvoweling was "Not quite censorship, but not quite unfettered commentary either." [18] A subsequent unsigned case study on online crisis communication asserted that "removing the vowels from participants' comments only increased the gulf between the editors and the community" during the controversy. [19]
Matt Baumgartner, a blogger at the Albany Times Union, reported in August 2009 that the newspaper's lawyers had told him to stop disemvoweling comments. [20]
Nielsen Hayden originally disemvoweled postings manually, using Microsoft Word. Because the letter Y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, there are a variety of ways to treat it. Nielsen Hayden's policy was never to remove Y, in order to maintain legibility. [21]
The technique has been facilitated by plug-in filters to automate the process. The first, for MovableType, was written in 2002; [22] others are available for WordPress [23] and other content management systems.
Since the 2000s, various company and band names have been making use of full or partial disemvowelling, such as twttr (original name of Twitter), abrdn, BHLDN, Tumblr, Flickr, or Scribd. [24] Artists and band names without vowels include Mstrkrft, MGMT, MSCHF, MNDR, Blk Jks, Sbtrkt, WSTRN, HMGNC, Strfkr, Kshmr, LNDN DRGS, LNZNDRF, PVT, RDGLDGRN, Dvsn, SWMRS, and Dwntwn. [25] Disemvoweling can be used due to copyright or search engine optimization reasons. [26] For voice user interfaces, band and song names without vowels can be difficult to process. [27]
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$217 billion as of November 1, 2024, according to Forbes. He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 that enables its users to write blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.
Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.
Xeni Jardin is an American weblogger, digital media commentator, and tech culture journalist. She is known as a former co-editor of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing, a former contributor to Wired Magazine and Wired News, and a former correspondent for the National Public Radio show Day to Day. She has also worked as a guest technology news commentator for television networks such as PBS NewsHour, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and ABC.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden is an American science fiction editor, fanzine writer, essayist, and workshop instructor. She is a consulting editor for Tor Books and is well known for her weblog, Making Light. She has also worked for Federated Media Publishing, when in 2007 she was hired to revive the comment section for the blog Boing Boing. Nielsen Hayden has been nominated for Hugo Awards five times.
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Patrick James Nielsen Hayden, is an American science fiction editor, fan, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, teacher and blogger. He is a World Fantasy Award and Hugo Award winner, and is an editor and the Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books.
John Kellogg Hodgman is an American author, actor, and humorist. In addition to his published written works, such as his satirical trilogy The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All, he is known for his personification of a PC in contrast to Justin Long's personification of a Mac in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, and for his work as a contributor on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
xB Browser was a web browser designed to run on both the Tor and XeroBank anonymity networks, and is available as component of the xB Machine and the xB Installer.
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The Media Bloggers Association (MBA) is a United States membership-based, non-partisan voluntary association describing its activity as "supporting the development of 'blogging' or 'citizen journalism' as a distinct form of media".
Rob Walker is an American journalist, author and educator, whose primary interests include design, business, technology, consumer culture, and the arts.
Violet Blue is an American journalist, author, editor, advisor, and educator.
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His manner is not in the least cockneyish—as he neither disemvowels his syllables nor asperates his H's.
Censored, even though disemvoweled (as in *br*dg*d or s*n*t*z*d)
I decided that since nobody was paying attention to PS's arguments anyway, and it's dreary having to scroll up and down past them, they'd be better shortened. So I took out the vowels.
Disemvowelling. You can still read it if you want to work at it, but you don't read it automatically. I prefer it to deleting posts that have objectionable material in them. Sometimes, if it's just a phrase or sentence or paragraph that's the problem, I'll disemvowel that and leave the rest in plaintext.
