Own the language and you own the Internet

The Master supports flaming of newbies who are ignorant of netiquette, not to mention emoticons, and should be driven from both the domain and the Web.

An analysis of this sentence shows one way, in the nineties, the Internet and Web struggled to gain credibility in the business world and why, even today, business people can be misled by language and miss out on opportunity as a result.

Consider the language business people were met with when they discovered the Internet.

On one level, the language was off-putting because it was not only cute but self-important. "Netiquette" suggested that good manners learned elsewhere might not cut it on the Internet. As if, in the business world, it was appropriate (much less effective) to show up at a party of strangers and shout, "Hey, I'm Dave. Anybody want to buy insurance from me?"

At the same time we were being insulted, computer programmers and technologists threw a blizzard of acronyms and unnecessary complexity at us. To use the Internet we needed an ISP (Internet Service Provider). The core computer language wasn't Web programming, but HTML (hyper text markup language} sent through HTTP (hyper text transfer protocal). Websites didn't just have an address, they had a domain name sold to us by a Registrars approved by ICANN (International Consortium of Addresses, Names and Numbers).

The real catastrophe, however, was that in a fit of complete ignorance and impracticality, the inventors of the Internet saddled us with "the World Wide Web," or WWW. The Web! A kindly view is that only ignorance about the meaning of words would enable someone to deliberately conjure up an image of spiders (they bite us!) and the phrase, "oh what a web we weave, when we practice to deceive."

Connotations aside, the greater offense was that, from a practical stand point, we were immediately and desperately stuck with "www" to be spoken as a prefix to any Web iste address, as "dub-uh-ewe, dub-uh-ewe, dub-uh-ewe." That's nine syllables. Nine.

In every day English, marketers have long recognized that people apply a two-to-three-syllable-maximum rule of usage on any name. Thus International Business Machines (9 sylables) became IBM., (3). Coca-cola is "Coke," "General Motors" 'GM." Even McDonalds (3) often becomes Macs (1).

Yet today, after 10 years of growth, business people speak "www" as all 9 syllables, radio commercials included.

Let's stop.

Please!

The next time you must say "www" just say "dub dub dub" thus reducing the nine syllables to three. This change, which I first heard coming from New York in 2001, has been agonizingly slow in coming and is, in fact, an important measure of how little we've grown away from such a dubious linguistic beginning.

In fact, we continue to flounder. We're still stuck with "Web Masters," "Spam" and most recently, "blogs.." "Web Masters," which may be dying out, conjures up the image of a wacko wearing a Spider man costume and Merlin's hat while stirring a cauldron of bubbling brew. Professionals prefer the term Web programmer, but Web Master persists today, most notably when a business person, possibly still resentful about these language barriers, says in a tone of distaste or condescension, "Are you the Web master, then?" "Domain name" fits right into the fantasy of "Web Master." "Site address" would have sufficed.

"Spam" is, of course, what our mothers made us eat because ham was too expensive. We all know what junk mail is, but for the early owners of the Internet "junk email" was a three syllable term that offered the rest of us instant ownership, a bad thing.

Lately, we have blogs. Of course a bog is a swampy, nasty place. Blog, then, conjures up a swamp with a large log floating in it. An non-scientifice sampling of blogs is indicates that the term "diary" or "personal journal" or "shared journal" would do.

All these language barriers confuse unnecessarily and discredit the Internet unfairly.

Worse yet, the creation of this language was, at least in part, intentional. Some of the language was invented by self-centered people who wanted to own the Web at the expense of the greater good. Some of the language was invented by people with as much thought to functionality as the man who invented the QWERTY keyboard (which is, by the way, incredibly inefficient). The creators of the language of the Internet wanted to own - and still want to own - the Net and the Web without having to share it straight up with the rest of the world, particularly the business world.

What the business world - what the rational world must do- is wrestle control back and apply some common sense. For "www", we should say dub dub dub. We should replace "Master" with programmer. We need to recognize that the effort to turn us off was in part deliberate. In the end, we can only profit from the Net and the Web, both in terms of the bottom line and the greater good if we take possession of the language and make it work for us.

This article first appeared as a column written by Dave Tedlock, NetOutcomes' president, for Tucson Business Edge, a monthly magazine published by the daily newspaper, the Tucson Citizen.