So, I’ve been noticing a strong uptick in the use of “the cloud” to refer to online, decentralized storage, computing and program-hosting lately. No shortage of companies are talking about their “cloud computing” services (including my hosting company, Joyent), and it’s become one of those “gotta have it” corporate buzzwords, and it seems like no company’s marketing people will let them release a website, product or service which isn’t in some way cloudy.

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (“Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s coming “iCloud” information hosting service. Apple is increasingly targeting the non-tech-saavy crowd, and this service, like most of their recent developments, is meant to be largely transparent to the end user. Once you’ve signed up, iCloud will take your music, your photos, your documents, your books, your backups, your contacts, calendars and mail, and any additional information you add in through third party programs, and make it instantly available on all of your devices. As they put it on their own website: “Create a document, iCloud stores it, and pushes it to your devices”. Bam. Magic. You turn the service on and suddenly your data is on all of your devices. Who wouldn’t want that?

A rose by any other name…

They’re doing something linguistically fascinating, though: they make no mention of their machines, servers, databases or storage (at least on the user-facing sites). You create, something cloudy happens, it’s on all your machines. They’ve de-emphasized the middle step. Mind you, Apple’s not the only “cloud” provider to do this (Google Docs de-emphasizes the middle step too), but Apple is certainly the most flagrant. But why bother? Why de-emphasize?

Well, I’ve been toying around with a new hobby. Whenever somebody says “in the cloud”, I’ve found it entertaining to replace it with “on somebody else’s computer”. This simple replacement brings me much joy in the absurdity it creates and how oddly different it makes the act sound:

“Our main working copy of the paper is on somebody else’s computer for group editing, but it’s password protected so nobody but us can edit it”

“My data is safe, I store my address book, mail, passwords, documents and photos on somebody else’s computer.”

“Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer.”

When put like that, we’re emphasizing the storage, the step that Apple and Google and most of the other cloud providers don’t really want you to think about too much. We’re emphasizing the fact that your data is sitting on a hard drive in another state, watched by a sysadmin who you don’t know. We’re emphasizing that when you put something on the cloud, it’s no longer just yours, and whereas naive users might not hesitate to put something into an amorphous cloud, actually transferring their data onto another computer might tickle enough of their sense of privacy to make them hesitate to upload those bank statements or that racy note from a lover.

In addition, we emphasize the fact that the data is there for the cloud provider to use per the TOS. How much do you think that the recording industry would pay to analyze en masse the music library of hundreds of thousands of iGadget users, even if just for market research? How valuable would it be for a website to figure out where to advertise by asking a company storing passwords “in the cloud” which sites are also visited by people who have stored passwords for their site?

Simply put, putting your data “in the cloud” is amorphous. It’s a mystery, but at the end of it, it just works. Putting your data on somebody else’s computer can get the same ends, but it forces you to think about your data in between your machine and your other devices.

Clouds aren’t necessarily bad

This may sound like a paranoid luddite’s rant, but I use the cloud. I currently use MobileMe, Apple’s current iCloud equivalent, for calendar and address book syncing. I use DropBox to keep my grocery list current across all my devices. I have an SFTP provider for storing backups of my data between at-home backups, and in case of emergency. The cloud can provide, in addition to convenience, a type of security against loss. As a friend of mine pointed out on Google+ (a cloud app):

Somebody else’s computer, with extensive redundancy and backup systems, which makes it much less likely to be lost if my house burns down. It is one kind of security. Not the “no one else will look at it” kind, but the “I won’t lose it in a domestic disaster” kind.

This is certainly true, and one of the best arguments for decentralized, cloud-like computing. Data on my computer in my backpack is fleeting. Data on a well-backed-up server in Dropbox’s massive datacenter is much less likely to be dropped, stolen, lit on fire or broken. These services have a use, whether convenience, ease-of-use for non-tech users, decentralization, or simply as an offsite backup of your data.

The techies who have read this far are doubtless thinking “Come on, I knew this already”. Of course data stored in the cloud is stored on somebody else’s computers. Heck, geeks like myself can likely picture server farms, maybe even imagining the mass storage required. They have a good idea of what sorts of things cloud providers can and can’t do across petabytes of data.

It’s not like I’m blowing the whistle on a massive conspiracy here. Anybody who has thought more than 20 minutes about the idea of a cloud knows that information has to go somewhere, and has deduced that presumably, it’s sitting on somebody else’s computer. Apple’s not choosing to skirt the issue so they can “pull a fast one” on the entire internet, they’re doing it because it’s less intimidating to new users. Google Docs is neglecting to mention their servers because they don’t need to. That’s not why you should be using the phrase “on somebody else’s computer”.

We should be talking about uploading your documents onto somebody else’s computer with grandma when she gets her new laptop and decides that that “iCloud” folder is just like her hard drive. We should be discussing storing information on somebody else’s computer for the clueless CFO who wants to upload the company’s records onto DropBox to be able to work on them from his new iPad.

We should be talking about “the cloud” as storing information on somebody else’s computer so that people will think, if only for a second, about whether they care that that picture, document, or file is something they would be OK with storing on somebody else’s computer.

Because TOSes, “privacy policies”, talking around the issue and other calming language aside, that’s what the cloud is. It’s a vast collection of other people’s computers, and in order to decide intelligently whether you want your data there, you need to know where “there” is.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Corporate Language, Language and Thought, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 6 Comments


What do Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle all have in common? The obvious answer would be to say that they’re all “Web 2.0″ sites, relying on user input and participation to succeed. However, there’s a less obvious (and far more language-related) characteristic that these and many other Web 2.0 sites share: Syllabic Consonants.

Phonology 1013: Syllable structure

Take an utterance like “Eddie poked a badger with a spoon”. There are several different ways we can break this down into smaller parts. We could simply break it into words (as we do in writing), giving us “Eddie”, “poked”, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, we could break it into individual sounds (phonemes), giving us “ɛ”, “d”, “i”, “p”, and so on.

However, as all speakers of all languages know (at some level), there’s a middle step: syllables. A syllable is a phonological unit comprised of one or more sounds which are naturally grouped together in speech. We would break our above example into syllables as follows: “E-ddie poked a ba-dger with a spoon”.

Most speakers, if asked to repeat something very, very slowly, will naturally break words into syllables, and all languages can be described in terms of syllables. Syllables are handy for determining the stress pattern of a word (in some languages), for dictating when sounds are allowed to be used (the velar nasal can’t start a syllable), and they play a major role in the phonology (sound system) of most languages.

A syllable has two sections. The first is the onset, or beginning of a syllable, is always a consonant (or several). Not all syllables need one, but they’re pretty common. For example, in the word “bat”, the onset is “b”. The rhyme (or rime) is the second part of the syllable, and is composed of the “nucleus” and the “coda”. The coda is the final consonant(s) of a syllable (t in “bat”). Coda consonants are less common, and some languages (like Hawaiian) don’t allow a coda at all.

The nucleus, however, is the fundamental piece of a syllable. You can have a syllable with no onset or coda (“a”), but you have to have a nucleus. The nucleus of a syllable is usually a vowel (as in “bat” or “scowl”), but some languages allow consonants to live in that spot and function as a syllable’s nucleus. When that happens, it’s called having a “syllabic consonant”, and is represented in the IPA with a small vertical line under the sound.

Some languages use syllabic consonants frequently. For instance, as one of my readers pointed out in a comment, in Czech, syllabic R’s are used frequently, and can result in seemingly unpronounceable sentences like “Strč prst skrz krk” (‘Put your finger down your throat’). However, most relevant to our discussion, in English, only /l/, /r/, /m/ and /n/ can be syllabic, and only in certain situations.

Now that we know what a syllabic consonant is, we can better explore the world of Web 2.0.

Syllabic Consonants and the Web

As you can now see, Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle are all pronounced with syllabic consonants at the end of their names (/r/, /r/, /n/, and /l/, respectively). This is interesting to me for two reasons.

First, syllabic consonants (especially /r/) are extremely common at the end of Web 2.0 site names (see this list for proof). First flickr, then variations on it, and now sites like tumblr and even twitter are on the syllabic bandwagon. At first, I thought that it might be an isolated case (with the -r ending just being trendy), but then I noticed that other syllabic sites were popping up. Kaboodle ends with a syllabic /l/, and now sites like pooln are working their way through the other syllabics in English. It’s worth noting, though, that google beat everybody to the syllabic /l/, even though they don’t draw attention with the trendy spelling.

Second, people seem to be recognizing the syllabicity of these final consonants, and skipping the written vowels altogether when creating their site names. The flickr -r may well have started the game, but now completely unrelated sites are becoming Web 2.0 by not including the written vowel in words with syllabic endings. Pooln chose its site name over “Poolin” or “Poolen”, tumblr over “tumbler”, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the first sites ending in /l/ pop up (at the time of writing, rumbl, tumbl and bumbl were already reserved). Interestingly, I’m yet to see a syllabic M site (perhaps because we generally just write the m with now vowel, as in “chasm” or “orgasm”). Who knows, though, maybe “phantm” is the next Web 2.0 ghost hunting site

Web 2.0: Complexity, Interactivity, Syllabicity

So, it’s pretty tough to deny the correlation between “Web 2.0-ness” and syllabic consonants. Of course, there are plenty of Web 2.0 sites that are vowel-nucleus-only (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace), but there does seem to be a trend at work here.

What does it all mean? Well, if you’re hoping to start a new Web 2.0 business, you might want to talk to a linguist or a phonologist. Syllabic consonants might not be the only key to success, but do you really want to take that chance? I assure you, my rates would be quite reasonabl.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Phonetics and Phonology | 2 Comments


This morning, I stumbled Adobe Systems Incorporated’s Permissions and Trademark Guidelines. This is basically Adobe’s way of dictating how it wants people to use and display its trademarks. Many companies have these, but Adobe’s policies regarding Photoshop are more restrictive (and thus, more laughable) then most.

Photoshop “to photoshop” out of your lexicon

They begin the Photoshop section with the phrase “Trademarks are not verbs”. Here, they’re objecting to the ubiquitous use of “to photoshop”, meaning “to use Adobe® Photoshop® software or similar image manipulation software to manipulate an image”. This prohibits phrases like “Dude, that is so photoshopped” or “the printing company photoshopped it for us”. This seems to be a common theme, with paralells to Xerox fighting to stop us from Xeroxing documents, but it’s still a bit crazy.

I think it’s ridiculous that they think they can stop this usage. One of the unifiying features of human language is our lazyness, and our desire to only do the minimum amount of speaking necessary. To think that we’ll gladly surrender “Could you photoshop this real quick?” in favor of “Could you enhance this image using Adobe® Photoshop® software real quick?” is completely insane.

The fact of the matter is that the verbed form is more versatile as well. In English, we can use other particles to change the meanings of an established verb, and “to photoshop” is no exception. One can photoshop something in, photoshop it out, photoshop something away, and so on. However, one cannot “enhance using Adobe® Photoshop® software out the guy in the background”. Instead, we’re asked to “enhance an image using Adobe® Photoshop® software in such a way that the guy in the background is removed from the picture”. Yeah, we’re going to do that, Adobe. Sure thing.

Adobe doesn’t know what they want

The real beauty comes in that the next heading: “Trademarks are not nouns”. Adobe, you’re in blatant violation of your own trademark policies on this very website.

…and Photoshop is one of Adobe’s most valuable trademarks…
…Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks…
…Get everything in Photoshop CS3 plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content and performing image analysis….

In each of the above phrases, “Photoshop” is acting as a noun. So, I don’t think noun-like usage is what Adobe’s really worried about. Let’s look at their explanation:

CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.

It looks like what they’re really trying to ban is “Photoshop-Related Metonymy“. Metonymy is where a commonly associated element (or part of something) is used to refer to the whole thing. For instance, “The White House was silent on the corruption charges” or “The press is more and more biased every day” are both metonymic expressions, using parts of these establishments to represent the whole.

So, although I suspect they have no problem with noun form use (“Photoshop® is exceptionally good at what it does”), they’re worried about metonymy with manipulated images, like “Photoshops are causing more scandals every day for the embattled prince”. Perhaps they should be clarifying that on their website, lest they be forced to sue themselves.

Other miscellaneous escapes from reality

According to Adobe, “Trademarks may never be used as slang terms”. This is just charming because it’s an attempt to control casual usage. I can understand their not wanting an ad campaign with “Help Photoshoppers Photoshop better”, but trying to regulate casual conversation shows Adobe to be out of touch with not only language usage, but with reality.

Finally, I’m not sure I buy this “Proper Adjectives” thing. To claim that “Adobe Photoshop” is incorrect and meaningless without adding “software” is a bit ridiculous. Whether or not they want to pretend that Photoshop isn’t a noun, it won’t really change how speakers view and use the term. It just makes them seem stodgy and delusional.

Adobe Systems Incorporated v. Continental Drift

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: A speaker (or grammarian) trying to stop language from changing is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift.

Adobe can write this up, and heck, they can even try and enforce parts of it with marketing and high-profile cases. However, I hope they realize the folly of trying to change established words and constructions, especially when the ones suggested are longer and less useful than the originals. No matter what they do, in everyday speech, people will photoshop images, those images will be photoshops, and photoshopping will be an entertaining pastime on the internet.

Know, however, that we’re not doing it to hurt you, Adobe. Our language is a language of love for your software, and the fact that “Photoshop” is so ubiquitous is a sign of our respect for your work. So, dearest Adobe, please stick to manipulating images, and leave the language manipulation to us.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language Censorship, Language Change, Language Usage, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 5 Comments

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