Eye on the Web: The Digitizing of the English Language

CreativePro Staff

We all know the Internet has changed our economy — there are enough IPO millionaires and 24-year-old CEOs to keep us aware of that. We know the Web has changed the way we work — we can conference with coworkers in distant places and find just about every bit of information we ever wanted just by logging on. We know the Web has changed our leisure time — instead of meeting new friends at the local coffee shop, we can enter a chat room and become instantly popular. Another thing the Web has changed that may not be quite so obvious, is our language.

Sure there are words we use freely today that we didn’t have in our lexicon twenty years ago (or even five). Words like e-mail, Internet, modem, bandwidth, digerati, emoticon, and cyberspace. These new words worming their way into our language are to be expected; a similarly impressive host of new words exploded onto the scene during the last great revolution in technology, the Industrial Revolution (words like factory, assembly line, and, perhaps, machine). But what interests me are the words whose meanings have gradually changed as a result of the digital revolution, until their utterance evokes not the meanings to be found in Webster’s, but something else entirely.

Can I Have a Gooey Cookie?
To illustrate this point, I compared my hulking hardcover 1976 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary to three online sources: Stephen Jenkins’ Glossary of PC and Internet Terminology, Matisse Enzer’s Glossary of Internet Terms, and the NetLingo Dictionary of Online Words. At the risk of sounding like the word geek I secretly am, I must say I’ve never had so much fun. Here’s what I found out:

The American Heritage Dictionary defines wallpaper as "paper printed with designs or colors, used as a decorative wall covering." Though I understand real-world (another term we wouldn’t need but for the Internet) wallpapering to be somewhat of a lost art, my mother was mad for it in the 1980s, and when we were kids our bedrooms were slathered in new patterns every year. Today, thanks to Microsoft and its ubiquitous Windows operating systems, the word wallpaper evokes those tiled images of your cat Stanley that cover your computer monitor’s background.

Protocol, defined in the offline world as "the forms of ceremony and etiquette observed by diplomats and heads of state," (not to mention a 1984 Goldie Hawn movie) is now something you’re likely to hear bandied about by your office IT specialist. ("Well, it looks as if you’ve got the wrong Internet Protocol address entered here.")

Backbone, a "high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network," according to Matisse’s Glossary, used to mean that collection of vertebrae connected to your ribs or something your mother was likely to break if you stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.

A cookie used to involve chocolate chips and being able to lick the bowl but has been transformed into something you’re supposed to accept with trepidation, if at all. When I was a kid, Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster was a kindly blue fellow with trouble controlling his impulses; now he’s more likely something to be feared by the protective parents of millions of Web-surfing youngsters.

Then there is Spam, the canned meat popular with Pacific Islanders and American pop culture fanatics. My father, who grew up in Louisiana, used to eat Spam for breakfast. These days it means either an unwanted e-mail message, or one sent to a whole bunch of people at once ("Sorry to Spam you all, but…). NetLingo tells us the term originated from a Monty Python song that repeated the word Spam ad nauseum.

My Mousepad (or Mouse Ball) Needs Cleaning or
Put it on a Floppy
A mouse used to be what my cat proudly deposited at my feet before demanding a treat. Or, according to the American Heritage Dictionary "an affectionate term for a little girl or young woman," which says something about how far our language had evolved even before we all got computers in our homes. These days, of course, it is that little pod connected to a cord that you use to move the cursor around your computer screen. Actually, one of the more clever ad campaigns I’ve seen (appropriately, Raymond Chandler once said of chess that its as "elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency"), tells consumers that California cheese is "the reason the mouse was invented in Silicon Valley."

There are more: a flame — once a tongue of fire rising from your camp stove — is now an incendiary e-mail message liable to start a flame war. A thumbnail — once the part of your thumb where you apply the nail polish — is now a teeny-tiny version of an image you may be manipulating on your computer. A driver — once the fellow steering the bus that takes you to work in the morning — is now a bit of software that helps your computer communicate with your printer, scanner, or what have you. And a virus, which used to be what you had when your mother said you could stay home from school, is now a malicious hunk of code designed to make your computer do wacky things.

Finally, there is my personal favorite, the word that may have started it all: Web. American Heritage gives eleven definitions of the word, from "a textile fabric" to "a latticed or woven structure" to "a fold of skin or membranous tissue" to "a continuous roll of paper, as newsprint." None of them comes close to today’s almost universally accepted meaning of the word — according to Matisse, "the universe of hypertext servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together." And the very reason for our latest cultural, technological, and economic revolution.

There’s something very satisfying about the evolution of a language. It means we’re growing, changing, adapting — not sitting still. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to wonder if our children’s children will be talking about cheesing the weaver to bolster the tailgate, or something just as seemingly nonsensical to our aging ears.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.