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 post contains a discussion of profanity and its censorship. As you can imagine, the post must contain profanity to advance the discussion. Sorry if that offends you.

So, a friend of mine on Twitter recently linked me to a post in Apple’s Support manuals entitled “How to prevent profanity from appearing in Dictionary”.

The obscene and filthy people at Oxford American Dictionary

As most OS X users know, Apple includes a wonderful program called “Dictionary.app” with every copy of OS X 10.4. This program lets you access an electronic copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus. There, you can find good definitions, etymologies, and pronunciations. You can even have it give pronunciation in the IPA if you tell it to do so in the application’s Preferences dialog.

The beautiful part of this is that it’s an entire dictionary. It may not be the full, unabridged version, but it’s very good for free software. You can find nearly any word you’d like in there, ranging from phone to phoneme to allophone. However, you can also find all sorts of profanity, defined in academic terms.

Take, for example, the treatment of one of the more vulgar words in the English language, “fuck”:

fuck |fək| vulgar slang verb [ trans. ]
1 have sexual intercourse with (someone). • [ intrans. ] (of two people) have sexual intercourse.
2 ruin or damage (something).
noun an act of sexual intercourse.
• [with adj. ] a sexual partner.
exclamation used alone or as a noun ( the fuck) or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.

(There’s much, much more about this fascinating word)

So, although it definitely contains the word and examples of the usage, one could hardly argue that it’s truly wanton and profanely using them.

Why censor the Dictionary?

Yes, the Dictionary app contains uses of profanity. However, these uses are all academic, and used in the context of describing the profanity itself. So, this raises the obvious question of why one would bother censoring the dictionary at all.

Perhaps a parent might be afraid that little Jimmy will learn those horrid, horrid terms. However, in order for little Jimmy to find them, he’d have to seach for them.

Once little Jimmy knows the terms well enough to search for them, chances are, his mind is already “corrupted” and he’s heard or seen the terms elsewhere. No matter how much fundamentalist parents desire to do so, you can’t make him unlearn what a word means, so there’s not a whole lot of point to keeping the largely academic discussion of the words away from him.

However, even if little Jimmy stumbles across a profane word online, perhaps it’s better that he looks it up immediately and gets the relatively tame information from the Dictionary App, rather than asking his third grade teacher what it means.

Either way, Profanity is a fact of life, and no matter how badly some people don’t want to hear it, it exists. Blocking objective, academic analysis of it won’t make the “problem” go away, and really, it’ll only make the word more tantalizing.

So, don’t censor the Dictionary Application. In the age of the Internet, little Jimmy will always be able to find out what a given word means, no matter how hard you try to censor him. Let Jimmy use the dictionary to find out what words mean in an educational sense.

Unless, of course, you’d prefer he just type “fucking” into a Google Image Search and start browsing. I didn’t think so…

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments


I’ve recently developed a minor affinity for a blog named LifeHacker, which shares little tips, tricks, and hacks that you can apply to your computer, yourself, and your life in general. It’s a decent site, and definitely worth a look if you’re bored.

However, what caught my eye today was not the content, but an interaction in a comment thread on optimizing your Mac. As such threads tend to do on any forum, it rapidly devolved into “Yay! Macs rule!” “Eww! Macs suck!”.

Applied usage of the Typo Defense

To support the “Macs suck” side, one poster by the name of “Quikboy”, posted as follows:

I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 4 years. It’s not really anything special. At first it may seem cool, but after a while, it’s just ok. It starts seeming like the same old, same old. They’re pretty expensive too. I got a Sony Vaio during Christmas, and I’ve decided to use it for my personal use…

Now, this is fascinating, because, as “Jamie Phelps” points out in the thread, MacBook Pros first came out last April. There’s no possibility, even if he had prerelease hardware, that he could have owned a MacBook Pro for more than a year or two. I assumed that he made a simple mistake and confused “Powerbook”, Apple’s previous line of High-End laptops, with “MacBook Pro”. Had he left it alone, he might’ve seemed a bit out-of-touch or unfamiliar with his hardware, but not actively decietful.

However, “Quikboy” wouldn’t go quietly. He snapped back with this post, a variation on the ages old “typo defense”:

@Jamie Phelps:

Sorry, my ceiling light was dim. I was using the numpad, and pressed 4 instead of one. If you didn’t notice, 4 is right above one. I didn’t see that mistake and submitted the comment. Sorry. It has been out for almost a year at least as far as I remembered. I bought it somewhere in March or April of ’06. Seems like a year to me.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean it’s well applied

To quote Abraham Lincoln, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”.If we believe his typo defense, then his intended post reads “I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 years.”

The problem here is that English marks plurality (the presence of more than one subject or object) in more than one place in a sentence. To change “I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 year”, we not only change the number, but we also add the plural morpheme (a chunk of sound that conveys a certain meaning) -s. In many cases, we’ll even mark a single object with an article rather than with a number (“had it for a year”).

So, even if he did, in fact, transpose the numbers due to a dim light on the keyboard, he also added an -s, and possibly even deleted an article. To me, it sounds like “Quikboy” got called on a lie, and didn’t have the sense to use a stronger defense (“Oh, I meant powerbook”). The Typo Defense failed him, but it doesn’t have to fail you.

Teh Pefrect Cirme

The Typo Defense is really limited in its applications. Here are some ground-rules.

You can only reliably argue one or two letters as a typo, not entire substitutions. You’d never get away with “You suck” “Huh?” “Oh, sorry, typo, I meant ‘You have nice hair’”.

Similarly, it’s more difficult to argue certain switches. “Quikboy” plays the “the keys are right next to each other” card well, but then fails because, as I pointed out, English grammar is sensitive to plural distinctions.

That brings us to the final rule, make sure that the sentence and sound structure doesn’t give it away. If you say “Wow, she’s quite got an a**”, you can’t go back and claim that you meant “She’s got quite a mass”. The a/an alternation will hang you.

When it works, though, the Typo Defense can be a valuable face-saving tool. Keep it in your “Oh no, what’d I just say?” toolbox right next to the Cat-on-the-keyboard Dodge and the “Oops, wrong window” absolution.

However, the best option might just be to come clean. The internet is resourceful and unforgiving, and some day, some linguist might highlight your post and dissect it, revealing the terrible truth. Wouldn’t that be creepy?

EDIT: Wow. Somebody just pointed out the Plurality error in the thread. See, there’s nowhere to hide…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet | 5 Comments

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