emoji

31 May 2016

Selection of representative emoji

Emoji are pictograms used in electronic communications. An emoji is a digital icon used to express an emotion or idea, a twenty-first century updating of the old ascii emoticons like the winking face, ;-), used to mark a joke or sarcasm. 

The etymology is rather straightforward, but may be a bit surprising to some. It’s a borrowing from Japanese, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the origin has nothing to do with emotion, as the emo- might suggest. Instead it’s a compounding of e-, meaning picture, and -moji, meaning a letter or character. The word in Japanese dates to at least 1928, and it may be a calque of the English pictograph, which has the same picture-character elements. So the Japanese may have borrowed it from English, translated it into Japanese, and then given the Japanese version back to English.

English use of emoji dates to 1997, when it appears in the Nikkei Weekly, an English-language Japanese newspaper. The first citation in the OED from a non-Japanese source is from Wired magazine in 2001.

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Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2013, s. v. emoji, n.

dirigible

6 May 2017

Today, the word dirigible is almost always used as a noun, referring to a zeppelin-type airship, and I always had it in my head that the word was related to rigid, a reference to the rigid frame of such an aircraft. But that is not the case. The word began life as an adjective meaning capable of being directed or steered. It was formed from the Latin verb dirigere, meaning to direct, steer, or guide. So a dirigible is a steerable balloon.

The adjective dates to the late sixteenth century but in the 1880s began to be applied specifically to balloons. By 1907 the word was being used as a noun to refer to Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s airships.

Cf. airship, blimp, zeppelin.

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Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. dirigible, adj. and n.

deplatform

4 May 2019

The verb deplatform is rather new. It’s not yet in the major dictionaries, so I’ll attempt a definition:

To disinvite a speaker from an event or to remove a user a from a social media platform due to their use of hate speech, engaging in harassment, or violation of the platform’s rules.

The earliest use of the term that I’ve been able to find is in a discussion of a video game that allows users to hit fascist protesters with a purse.

Danuta Danielsson hitting a Neo-Nazi with her handbag in Växjö, Sweden 1985. Photograph by Hans Runesson.

The game is Handväska! (Swedish for “handbag”) and was inspired by a famous 1985 photo of Danuta Danielsson hitting a Swedish Neo-Nazi marcher with her purse. Danielsson was a Polish Jew living in Sweden whose mother had survived Auschwitz. The game was created in 2017 and reported on by the Australian gaming website Kotaku.com on 10 February 2017. Comments on the article developed into a broader discussion of how to address hate speech and included this:

I’m not saying that any group is required to take this shitstain seriously or give him a platform to speak. I would much rather see hate speech law actually enforced against him than not.

Delegitimise and deplatform people like this through ridicule or argument. Disrupt their ability to speak through non-violent protest.

A few days later, 22 February, deplatform was used on the American website Salon.com:

Everybody loves free speech until they don’t. The exact opposite is the case with “deplatforming,” which is what recently happened to former Breitbart editor and professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos. He was originally scheduled to speak this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference but saw his invitation rescinded after videos resurfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia.

Initially, deplatforming was primarily used to refer to rescinding an invitation to speak at an event, as in the Yiannopoulos case referenced in the Salon quote. But the term has widened to include banning those with controversial views from social media platforms, as it is in the December 2018 article on Mashable.com:

Over the past year, internet companies wielded the hammer known as “deplatforming” more than ever. Deplatforming, or no-platforming, is the term for kicking someone off social media or other sites when they break the rules by, say, using hate speech, or participating in harassment campaigns. Getting deplatformed means that the rule-breaker can no longer use that platform to share their thoughts or feelings with the world.

Deplatforming is, itself, a controversial tactic. Those who have been deplatformed often claim that their rights to “free speech” have been violated, which may be true in some cases where a public university (i.e., the government) has disinvited a speaker. Others claim that while it is legal, it violates the idea that challenging abhorrent views in the “marketplace of ideas” is the best way to counter them. Others disagree, saying that deplatforming is a prime example of the marketplace of ideas in action. The tactic does, however, seem to be effective, in that people with odious views like Yiannopolous and Alex Jones have seen their influence drop markedly after losing their platforms.

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Sources:

Alexandra, Heather, “A Game Where You Go Bowling for Fascists,” Kotaku.com.au.

Kraus, Rachel. “2018 Was the Year We (Sort of) Cleaned Up the Internet.” Mashable.com. 26 December 2018.

Torres, Phil. “Milo, Donald Trump and the Outer Limits of Hate Speech: When Does Absolute Freedom of Speech Endanger Democracy?” Salon.com, 22 February 2017.

crisis actor

16 August 2018

The term crisis actor originated in the emergency preparedness community and originally referred to actors available for hire to participate in disaster and mass casualty drills as victims, witnesses, criminals, etc. Hiring trained actors is thought to increase the realism and effectiveness of such drills. But after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the term took a darker, conspiratorial turn.

The earliest citation for the phrase that I have found (I’m sure it can be antedated), is from the blog Crisisactors.org from 31 October 2012. This blog is no longer available on the internet for reasons that will become obvious. The blog post in question opens: 

Active Shooter Crisis Actors Target Mall Shootings via Visionbox

DENVER, CO, October 31, 2012 — A new group of actors is now available nationwide for active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises, announced Visionbox, Denver’s leading professional actors studio.

Visionbox Crisis Actors are trained in criminal and victim behavior, and bring intense realism to simulated mass casualty incidents in public places.

But after the 14 December 2012 mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which twenty children, aged six and seven, and six adult staff members were murdered, crisis actor took a sinister turn. Conspiracy theorists began claiming that the shooting was staged, and that the family members of the dead children who appeared on television advocating for gun control were actually crisis actors.

Use of this conspiratorial sense of crisis actor dates at least to 16 January 2013, a month after the shooting, when Gene Rosen, who lived near the school and had given aid to several students on the day of the shooting, was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor. He was being harassed by people who believed he was paid to give false accounts to the media:

“I don’t know what to do,” Rosen, a retired psychologist, told Salon. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting e-mails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘How much am I being paid?’”

So the history of crisis actor is that of twisting a term denoting a useful function, that of portraying people in disaster situations in order to train first responders, to one designating participants in a fictional conspiracy.

There is an older, unremarkable sense of crisis actor that is unrelated to the above. It comes from the world of political science, where it refers to a decision-maker in an international crisis. This sense dates to at least 1979 when it appears in a PhD dissertation which contends that one of the defining characteristics of a crisis is:

the recognition that the situational change which induces a crisis may originate in the internal as well as the external environment of the crisis actor.

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Source:

“Active Shooter Crisis Actors Target Mall Shootings via Visionbox.” Crisisactors.org. 31 October 2012. Internet Archive.

Edwins, Laura. “Sandy Hook ‘Truthers’ Harass Newtown Man, Conspiracy Theories Go Viral.” Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 2013, 7.

Minix, Dean Alan. The Role of the Small Group in Foreign Policy Decision-Making: A Potential Pathology in Crisis Decisions? PhD dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1979.

computer

23 August 2019

Computer has a rather straightforward etymology, although its usage may be a bit surprising. The word was originally applied to people, not machines.

Computer is derived from the verb to compute + -er, a standard suffix that denotes a person that does the task of the attached verb. The verb to compute comes to us from Norman French and in turn from the Latin computare, meaning to calculate. The verb appears in English by the late sixteenth century. So, a computer is one who calculates, and the noun appears in English by the early seventeenth century. From Richard Braithwaite’s 1613 Yong Mans Gleanings:

I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.

And many of these human computers were women, as calculation was considered mundane and repetitive work, beneath the dignity of men to perform, despite the fact that such calculations were often highly complex, requiring a high degree of mathematical skill.

Computer was being applied to machines by the mid nineteenth century. From Phemie’s Temptation, an 1869 novel by Marian Harland (the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune):

[Phemie] plunged anew into the column of figures. [...] Her pen was slowly traversing the length of the page, at an elevation of a quarter of an inch above the paper, her eyes following the course of the nib, as if it were the index of a patent computer.

The use of the modifier patent indicates that this mechanical sense is relatively new, and that readers would be accustomed to thinking of computers as people, not machines.

The use of computer to refer to a programmable, electronic, calculating machine appears shortly after World War II. The exact date is uncertain. During the war, the US and Britain made use of calculating machines to crack Axis codes, and the word computer was used to denote these machines. Most were mechanical apparatuses, but a few were electronic, although not yet fully programmable like a present-day electronic computer. In the early citations of the word’s use to denote an electronic machine, it’s often difficult to determine if the word is used for a mechanical or an electronic device.

For example, in 1945 mathematician John von Neumann wrote:

Since the device is primarily a computer, it will have to perform the elementary operations of arithmetic most frequently.

Here he seems to be referring to a mechanical computer, saying the electronic device will primarily serve the function of a mechanical device. But in 1946, Bell Labs researcher George Stiblitz wrote:

If the computer is such that new formulas are easily set up in it, it may be economical to use it in the solution of 5 or 10 problems.

Here Stiblitz is referring to a programmable, electronic device. And by 1947 the term digital computer appeared in the journal Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation. But by 1950, the term was, without modification, widely understood to refer to the programmable electronic devices we’re familiar with today. From Philosophical Magazine of that year:

The problem of constructing a computing routine or “program” for a modern general purpose computer which will enable it to play chess.

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Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s. v. computer, n., compute, v.