Disemvoweling, disemvowelling (British English and Commonwealth English), or disemvowelment is writing a piece of text with all the removed.
Etymology
The word
disemvowel is a
pun and
portmanteau combining
vowel and
Disembowelment.
One of the earliest attestations of the word dates back to the 1860s.
The 1939 novel
Finnegans Wake by
James Joyce also uses it: "Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled"
.
Use as a moderation tool
A technique dubbed
splat out was used by
Usenet moderators to prevent
, by substituting a "splat" (i.e.,
asterisk) for some letters, often the vowels, of highly charged words in postings. Examples include
Nazi→
N*z*,
evolution→
*v*l*t**n,
gun control→
g*n c*ntr*l. According to the
Jargon File, "the purpose is not to make the word unrecognizable but to make it a mention rather than a use."
The term "disemvoweling"—attested from 1990
—was occasionally used for the splat-out of vowels.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used the vowel-deletion technique in 2002 for internet forum moderation on her blog Making Light.
Nielsen Hayden joined the group blog Boing Boing as community manager in August 2007, when it re-enabled comments on its posts,
Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing, said of the practice, "the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized."
After Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013,
Criticism
In July 2008,
New York Times reporter
Noam Cohen criticized disemvoweling as a moderation tool, citing a June 2008 dispute about the deletion of all posts on
Boing Boing that mentioned sex columnist Violet Blue. In the
Boing Boing comment threads resulting from this controversy, Nielsen Hayden used the disemvoweling technique. Cohen noted that disemvoweling was "not quite censorship, but not quite unfettered commentary either."
A subsequent unsigned case study on online crisis communication asserted that "removing the vowels from participants' comments only increased the gulf between the editors and the community" during the controversy.
Matt Baumgartner, a blogger at the Albany Times Union, reported in August 2009 that the newspaper's lawyers had told him to stop disemvoweling comments.
Implementation
Nielsen Hayden originally disemvoweled postings manually, using
Microsoft Word. Because the letter Y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, there are a variety of ways to treat it. Nielsen Hayden's policy was never to remove Y, in order to maintain legibility.
The technique has been facilitated by plug-in filters to automate the process. The first, for MovableType, was written in 2002;
Use in company and band names
Since the 2000s, various company and band names have been making use of full or partial disemvowelling, such as twttr (original name of
Twitter),
abrdn,
BHLDN,
Tumblr,
Flickr, and
Scribd.
Artists and band names that use full or partial disemvowelling include
Mstrkrft,
ARTMS,
MGMT,
MSCHF,
MNDR,
DNCE,
Blk Jks,
Sbtrkt,
WSTRN,
HMGNC,
Strfkr,
Kshmr,
TNGHT,
INXS,
LNDN DRGS,
LNZNDRF,
JMSN, PVT,
RDGLDGRN,
Dvsn,
SWMRS and
Dwntwn.
Disemvoweling can be used due to
copyright or search engine optimization reasons.
For voice user interfaces, band and song names without vowels can be difficult to process.
See also
-
English words without vowels
-
Vanity plate
-
Abjad, a writing system similar to an alphabet that removes most or all vowels
External links
