Browsing the Web

A web browser, if you think about it, is a peckish spider. Browse once meant a bud or leaf and so browsing is eating little bits of vegetation. In fact, the OED rather sternly points out that browsing and grazing are quite different things. Grazing is grassing and browsing is eating browse - leaves and buds and the like - which animals only usually do when there's no grass left.

The first recorded humans to browse were in Shakespeare and the browse that they browsed was cold meat. Nobody browsed a book until the nineteenth century, and the idea of going into a shop and just browsing the buds of commerce rather than buying anything is a purely twentieth century notion. And only twenty years ago did people start to browse the Internet.

It's rather appropriate, really. If there were grass in the real world we would graze; but for lack of proper pasture one ends up clicking on links, reading blogs and metaphorically and etymologically chewing at the sparse vegetation that grows in the central reservation of the Information Super-Highway.

I would say that it was impossible to use a browser to surf, but then I found this picture. So I shall simply leave you with the informaculus that the right to browse is called browsage.

Were I more skilled with Photoshop™ I would subimpose a cobweb and thus have a browser surfing the web. You'll simply have to use your imagination.

P.S. I can't think of anything to say about Kubla Khan today, maybe tomorrow.
P.P.S. Look! You're at blog.inkyfool.com. It worked.

The Acronyms and Initialisms Database System

What the world needs is a new quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) to deal with acronyms and initialisms. The other day the front page of the BBC news website looked like this (note the bottom left and top right):

The other one, in case you were wondering, is Northern Ireland. The problem of ambiguous initialisms has been the central scandal of the news over the last few weeks. Proportional Representation has fought with Public Relations on the front page. The International Panel on Climate Change has been in as much trouble as the Independent Police Complaints Committee ever since PC Delroy Smellie hit a member of the PC brigade at a demo (something that I saw on youtube on my PC).

The web has the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which stops two people both registering the same domain name and a similar leap forward in initialisms is long over due. I suggest, indeed I demand, that it should be called the Acronyms and Initialisms Database System.

I shall write to my Military Police about it.

Incidentally, in a preposterously technical sense an acronym is something that's pronounced as as single word like Scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) while an initialism is one where the individual letters are pronounced as in DVD (Digital Versatile Disc). Or maybe not. It depends which dictionary you read.

That's All She Wrote

Today Mrs Malaprop told me, on the subject of business, that she had written to somebody. I thought that this was quaint if not quixotic. I didn't think that business people wrote letters anymore, unless they had some legal significance like a summons or a demand for payment. It turned out that she had meant e-mail, a term that she not only doesn't hyphenate but also, it turns out, refuses to use as a verb.

Wrote, to me at least, always means a letter on paper enveloped in an envelope. I wasn't sure whether this misunderstanding was due to my peculiarity or Mrs Malaprop's so this evening I did some extensive research on a representative section of the British public and she agreed with me: writing means letters. Texts are texted, e-mails e-mailed: writing is a paper-and-ink business. (Oddly, one can write a song without jotting down a single word or note).

Whilst on the subject of the word wrote, there is an American expression, "That's all she wrote", which means nothing to an Englishman. In The River by Bruce Springsteen there's this line:

And I got Mary pregnant and, man, that was all she wrote

Hank Williams recorded a song called Dear John with the refrain:

And that's all she wrote, Dear John,
I've sent your saddle home.

All of this comes from a joke current among American soldiers during the Second World War. GIs used to get dumped a lot by their sweethearts back home. The dumping was usually epistolary and often lapidary. The joke runs that there are three soldiers comparing such letters. The first soldier describes the letter he got which was only a couple of lines long. The second soldier says that his was one line long: "Dear Jim, It's over". The third soldier replies that his letter went "Dear John" and that's all she wrote.
 
This joke, though not noticeably amusing, was so popular that "all she wrote" became a phrase meaning "to get bad news from a woman".
 
I went for years misunderstanding that Bruce Springsteen song.
 
 

Obscure phraseology

Bluetooth and Hat-Tips

Harald I of Denmark had blue teeth. Perhaps he had black teeth, nobody is quite sure as the meaning of blau has changed over the years. His other great achievement was to unite the warring provinces of Denmark and Norway under a single king (himself).

Jim Kardach developed a system in 1996 that would allow mobile telephones to communicate with computers thus uniting two independent areas of technology. Whilst working on the project he read The Longships by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson (which I read when I was twelve and remember to be rather good). The novel is set in the time of Harald Bluetooth. Jim Kardach felt he was uniting warring provinces of technology so he named the project Bluetooth. It was never meant to be the actual name on the marketing: blue teeth are not a pleasant image. But the name that was meant to be used - Pan - was already taken. So bluetooth it was and bluetooth it ever shall be.

You can read a full account of the naming process here.

I was reminded of all this indirectly by a friend who mentioned how much he liked the old-fashioned phrase hat-tip which is used by bloggers to give credit to a source. He was reminded of it by a hat-tip that I put up the other day and e-mailed me to say that "In my mind, the tipped hat is always a trilby."

It set me wondering when hats started to be tipped in the blogosphere. I can't work it out with any accuracy but here's a graph that I managed with Google on the use of the phrase in the news over the last ten years.

The last month without a single hat-tip appears to have been February 2004, so I imagine that the phrase must have come into common usage some time over the next few months.

There's something lovely about the antiquity of these phrases, rather like the old-fashioned freelance to describe somebody who will work for anyone.

An original marketing slide for Bluetooth technology incorporating a (slightly altered) runestone image of Harald Bluetooth.