IT IS ENGLISH BLOG

Intertubes is a slang term for the Internet.  

The way in which this term came into existence is described in the Wikipedia item on Series of Tubes.  

I came across the term because I discovered that a site called TubeTrove was linking to my blog in its English language section.  I thought the name TubeTrove was rather clever, as it reminded me of Treasure Trove,  and I looked at the description of the site, which describes it as ”A collection of good content from the intertubes.”  (Moreover, my blog is placed next to an item on “Scott Thornbury on grammar”, which for me is to have truly arrived, as I think he is the most interesting writer on grammar that I have ever read.)

Having put Intertubes into Google I discovered that I had been missing lots of tech buzz around this word, and in fact it prompted my rather weary memory cells to recall something about the notorious “The Internet is a Series of Tubes” speech from an American Senator.

Wordnik,  which “is projected to be the largest online dictionary ever”, gives Intertubes its due place, with some fantastic examples of  usage.  Wordnik was “launched by Erin McKean, former editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary”. We are told it  ”is a refuge for linguistic underdogs and etymological rejects alike.”  It looks to me like a site for word lovers to keep watching.

ETYM

Internet – a worldwide network of interlinked computers.

Tube – a tube is like a pipe, and the term pipe can mean a connection to the internet, with a bigger pipe referring to higher bandwidth and consequently greater speed.

Tube – I seem to remember that we used to call television “the tube”.

YouTube – a video sharing website.  A good way of putting yourself on the Intertubes.

“The trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted”, according to the Economist, in “Data, data everywhere“.  The amounts of data being left everywhere nowadays has lead to the use of the term “big data“.  This data is analysed by data scientists and aggregated by big business to show up trends.

“Data exhaust” is sometimes called “digital exhaust“.

The Double-Tonged Dictionary is a “lexicon of fringe English”.  It covers the term Data exhaust, giving it the Gloss: “the incidental statistics and information that accumulate when people interact with a system, process, or event, such as when tracking visitor interaction on a web site.”

Reading the Economist article left me feeling exhausted by the Big Brother type way in which so much of what we do nowadays is recorded and aggregated into statistics for the use of marketing men or goverments or whoever has access to our data.  

When I was browsing recently in a book shop I came across a book about “digital memory” and about the fact that the internet never forgets.  It is called “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger.  The Times Higher Education Supplement reviews it and says “his case against digital memory is humanist. He worries that it will not only change the way we organise society, but it will damage our identities.”

I worry also that the data exhaust that we leave behind us may not disperse and be forgotten, to be replaced by fresh air or a blank sheet, but may lurk around, reappearing from day to day, or from year to year, long after we ourselves have forgotten the original event.

ETYM

Exaust is waste gas left behind as you speed along in your car.  

Data exhaust is the trail you leave, showing where you have been, on the internet.

A Tablet PC is a mobile computer shaped like a slate.

Many tablets use multi-touch technology,  which allow the user to interact with the device using their fingers.  I have an iPhone, which I love, and one of its amazing features is that I can tap it to zoom in and pinch it to zoom out.  This is a “gesture user interface” or a “multi-touch user interface“.  

Apple’s iPad, which uses much of the same technology, is a tablet computer placed “somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone”. (The New York Times)

The Economist thinks that “the iPad and other tablets could shake up the computing scene” by for instance competing with netbooks, cheap mini-laptops.  See “Steve Jobs and the tablet of hope“.

Some people think that the Apple Tablet will take over as the leader in the eReader and digital publishing industry, competing with Amazon’s Kindle and other devices.  See Mashable’s ”Why Apple’s Tablet will eat Kindle’s lunch”.

Soon we may all be reading on our tablets, and I don’t just mean the ten commandments!  I, for one, would love to borrow my neighbour’s iPad.  But remember:  Thou shalt not covet …

See also:

Slates

Touch-walls

ETYM

A small flat piece of stone or metal.

God’s Ten Commandments given to Moses, and recorded in the Book of Exodus, were inscribed on Tablets of Stone.  

See Wikipedia: Tablets of Stone

“Now the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.”  Net Bible

unfriend – verb –

“To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

This is the Oxford Word of the Year 2009 and it features on the OUP Blog.  There is a discussion from readers about why the word is “unfriend” rather than “defriend”.  I made a small contribution.  It is still active, so you can go on too and comment if you want!

The OUP Blog item also covers other new technology words – hashtag, intexticated, netbook, paywall and sexting.

I have never actually “unfriended” (16,000 hits in Google) anyone in Facebook, but I have told some (by email) that I won’t be their Facebook friend, just their email friend.  The whole use of the word “friend” (by a piece of software) I find rather unpleasant.  It keeps asking me if I want to be friends with particular people, that I may well be friends with in the sense of well disposed towards them, but I may not want to exchange electronic messages with them.  

Maybe the whole new concept of “electronic friend” needs a few more prefixes to express the full range of new “relationships”.  We could have “unfriend”, “defriend”, “refriend”, “upfriend”, “downfriend” etc.  Suggestions requested!

ETYM

I will leave this up to the Oxford lexicographers!