Dot Com

8 April 2005

While conducting research for biztechdictionary.com I got to thinking about the domain name and the term dot com. The etymology isn’t very mysterious, but exactly when did the term and its various meanings arise.

The term dot com is used in the pronunciation of internet domain names and it is also used to refer to internet-based companies. But who decided that commercial internet addresses should end in .com and when did people start referring to companies as dot coms? And going further back, why and when did people start referring the "." mark as "dot"?

The use of .com as an internet domain name dates back to 1984, a decade before most people became aware of the internet. It was first proposed in October that year in RFC 920 (Request For Comments #920) of the Network Working Group. The title of the document was simply Domain Requirements and in it the authors, J. Postel and J. Reynolds, set up the basic top-level domains that we know today, .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, and .com. In it they define the com domain as:

"COM = Commercial, any commercial related domains meeting the second level requirements."

The use of "dot com" to refer to the top level domain of an internet address dates to at least 1990. The following appeared in a Usenet post in alt.callahans from 15 February of that year:

"Fuzzface whips out his handy DNS map of the Internet and starts flipping through the index. ‘Hmm <pause> COM <pause> MOT DOT COM.’"

Another early use is from a rec.humor.d posting from 3 July 1991:

"Yes, it is a full stop at the end of a sentence, but for computer filenames, I’ll call it a login dot com. I think my dad does, too, but then again, neither of us are computer illiterate, and he is originally from India."

The use of the word "dot" to represent the "." mark is, of course, much older. There is a single known use of the word dot in Old English, dating to around 1000, meaning the head of a boil. The word then disappears from English for over 500 years, reemerging in the 16th century with the meaning of a small lump. The sense meaning a speck or spot of color dates to 1674, and the sense meaning the mark made by a pen is from 1748. And famously, Morse telegraphy in the 19th century used "dot" to mean the shorter of the two Morse signals, the counterpart of the "dash."

The use of "dot com" to mean a company, especially an internet company, obviously comes after the domain naming convention. The earliest reference I have found is another Usenet post, this one from 1 July 1994, in which the author refers to her (or his?) company, Dow Chemical, as a "dotcom:"

"Cary K Black (Who’s opinions are his/her own and not those of his/her dotcom!)"

The use of the term to refer to an internet company in particular is from two years later and is recorded in the OED from the magazine Internet World:

"A broad discussion of what’s around the corner for dot.coms. What effect will ‘dumb-delivery’ devices have as they make the Web more accessible to the home market?"

Other variations of the term include dot-commer, an employee of a dot com company and dot bomb, a failed dot com company.

In Passing: Eleanor Gould

4 March 2005

Eleanor Gould is a name that is probably not familiar to most of you, but over the course of her fifty-four year career as “grammarian” for The New Yorker, Gould had a quiet, but profound impact on the world of letters. Miss Gould passed away last month at the age of eighty seven.

Words on the Web: Baby Names

4 March 2005

Have you ever wondered which names were most popular in years past? What’s the most popular name today?

Well Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, has created a Java tool that searches the Social Security Administration database of names for answers to questions just like this. Of course, since the data comes from the Social Security Administration the information is relevant only to the United States, but even non-Americans will have fun playing with this website.

Check it out at http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/ Even if you are not going to name a baby any time soon, you’ll want to take a gander at this site. It’s really neat.

Casting

4 March 2005

“MP3 players, like Apple’s iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and weblogging an established part of the internet; all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?”

�Ben Hammersley, “Audible Revolution,” The Guardian, 13 February 2004

Podcasting? What the heck is podcasting? It is the streaming of an MP3 or other audio file format to portable players, like Apple’s iPod, either for play immediately or timeshifted for later listening. The quote from the Guardian is the earliest usage that I have found and Hammersley may well have coined it.

The term is a portmanteau of the trade name iPod and broadcasting. Broadcasting itself was once a cutting edge technical term. The verb, to broadcast, dates to 1921, at least in its technical sense. (There is an older sense, dating to 1813, meaning to scatter seed by hand.) It originally referred to the new medium of radio. The noun form, broadcasting, dates to 1922.

Broadcast is, obviously, derived from the roots broad + cast. Both have Germanic roots. Of the two, broad is older, from the Old English br�d, meaning extended in width, wide. The term is found in Old English literature from before 1000. Cast’s appearance in English dates to around 1230, in the form casten and is from the Old Norse kasta. Both the Middle English word and its Norse root mean to throw. So, to broadcast means to spread widely.

Cast is used in a wide number of situations where one throws something. One casts dice when playing craps. You cast a ballot at the polls. One is cast ashore by a wave or one casts bait into the water when fishing. You cast a look, a reflection, a shadow, or a light.

As a root, cast has been a rather productive one in the media business. It gave rise to newscast in 1928, first as a verb meaning to broadcast news content. The noun came a few years later. Telecasting makes its appearance in 1937, distinguishing the new medium of television from radio broadcasts. There is also radiocast, which one would think would be a retronym, but no, it dates to 1931. Also from the 1930s is narrowcast, a transmission intended for a select audience. The next decade brought us simulcasting, which is the simultaneous broadcast of a program on both radio and television. The verb to simulcast dates to 1948.

Cast made the jump to digital content in 1981 with multicast, a transmission over a computer network to a group of users. 1995 brought us webcast, a multicast made over the worldwide web.

All these precursors brought us to podcasting in early 2004.

But none of these should be confused with forecasting. That word is also from cast, but from a different sense of the word. Instead of meaning to throw or spread, this sense of cast means to calculate or reckon and dates to before 1300. So to forecast (1388) is to calculate the future. Forecast has not been as productive as its media cousin. It has only given rise to the seldom used nowcasting (1976), meaning the telling of current conditions, used primarily with weather information.

2004 ADS Word of the Year

1 February 2005

If you can stand one more article on words of the year, here is one more.

At its annual meeting on 7 January, held this year in Oakland, California, the American Dialect Society nominated and voted on its choice for the 2004 Word of the Year. In the meeting chaired by Wayne Glowka of Georgia State College and State University, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, and Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, ADS Executive Secretary, the society decided which word was most notable or prominent in 2004.

Each year since 1990, in proceedings that are described by Metcalf as “serious, but not solemn,” the society chooses a “vocabulary item” (it need not be a word; phrases, affixes, and the like are eligible) that best represents the past year.

Word of the Year
This year the “word” selected as Word of the Year with 36 votes was red/blue/purple state, as used on the 2004 presidential electoral map. Other terms nominated were:
wardrobe malfunction, n., an unanticipated exposure of bodily parts (19 votes);
flip flopper, n., a politician who changes political stances; a waffler (11 votes);
mash up, n., a blend of two songs or albums into a single cohesive musical work (2 votes); and
meet up, n., a local special interest meeting organized through a national web site (2 votes).

Most Useful
The ADS also selects notable words in various categories. The word selected as Most Useful, with 47 votes, was phish, v., to acquire passwords or other private information (of an individual, an account, a web. site, etc.) via a digital ruse. Noun form: phishing. Other nominees for Most Useful were:
backdoor draft, n., the filling of military jobs through reactivation of former troops or through forced enlistment extensions known as stop-loss orders (16 votes);
fetch, adj., cool or stylish, from the movie Mean Girls (11 votes); and
blog- as a prefix or combining form in making other words: blogosphere, blognoscenti, blogarrhea (1 vote).

Most Creative
The selection for Most Creative had to go to a second ballot as no nominee won fifty percent of the vote. The term finally selected was pajamahadeen, n., bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media (36/52 votes). The runner-up was lawn mullet, n., a yard neatly mowed in front but unmowed in the back (29/27 votes). Other nominees were:
hillbilly armor, n., scavenged materials used by soldiers for improvised bullet-proofing and vehicle hardening, esp. in Iraq (11 votes) and
nerdvana, n., geeks really geeking out; collaborative geekiness (6 votes).

Most Unnecessary
The selection of Most Unnecessary also had to go to a run-off ballot, with the winner being the oxymoronic carb-friendly, adj., low in carbohydrates (38/50 votes). The runner-up was erototoxin, n., a (nonexistent) chemical released in the brain of a person looking at pornography (17/26 votes). Other nominees were:
-based as in reality-based, faith-based (14 votes), and
stalkette, n., a female stalker (10 votes).

Most Outrageous
The winner of the Most Outrageous title truly deserved it. It was santorum, n., the frothy residue of lube and fecal matter which sometimes is the result of anal sex (39 votes). The term was coined by alternative media columnist Dan Savage after Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who publicly compared homosexuality with bestiality. Other nominees were:
Jesusland, n., the country which will be the rump US after the blue states have seceded and joined Canada (13 votes);
douche chill, n., interjection used to break a sudden silence after a verbal faux pas, from the TV show Arrested Development (9 votes); and
clone and kill, n., raising a crop of humans for parts (6 votes).

Most Euphemistic
The selection for Most Euphemistic term of 2004 was badly sourced, adj., false (50 votes). Other nominees were:
wardrobe malfunction, n., unanticipated exposure of bodily parts, (15 votes);
angel, n., a soldier killed in action (7 votes); and
partner reduction, n., divorce or severing of a romantic relationship (2 votes).

Most Likely To Succeed
The word chosen as Most Likely To Succeed, on the second ballot ballot, was red/blue/purple states (21/46 votes). The runner-up was mash-up (23/22 votes). Other nominees were:
meet-up (16 votes);
orange revolution, n., the recent Ukrainian political crisis (5 votes); and
krunked, n., cool, crazy (2 votes).

Least Likely To Succeed
The winner in the final category was FLOHPA, n., collectively, the states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, said to have been important in the 2004 American presidential election, from the postal codes for the three states: FL, OH, and PA (41 votes). The other nominees were:
holy toast, n., a grilled cheese with the image of the Virgin Mary, sold on eBay for $28,000 (23 votes);
luanqibaozhao, n., Chinese for a complicated mess (8 votes); and
security mom, n., a female voter said to vote according to the protection of her family (2 votes).