Sticker "Ght whln" using the Run-DMC logo design: disemvoweling of German slogan "Geht wählen" ("Go vote")
Disemvoweling, disemvowelling (British and Commonwealth English), or disemvowelment is writing a piece of text with all the vowel letters removed.[1] Disemvoweling is often used in band and company names. It used to be a common feature of SMS language where space was costly.[1]
Etymology
The word disemvowel is a pun and portmanteau combining vowel and disembowel.[1] One of the earliest attestations of the word dates back to the 1860s.[2] The 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce also uses it: "Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled".[3]
Use as a moderation tool
A technique dubbed splat out was used by Usenet moderators to prevent flamewars, 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."[4] The term "disemvoweling"—attested from 1990[5]—was occasionally used for the splat-out of vowels.[4][6]
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used the vowel-deletion technique in 2002 for internet forum moderation on her blog Making Light.[7] This was termed disemvoweling by Arthur D. Hlavaty later in the same thread.[8]
Nielsen Hayden joined the group blogBoing Boing as community manager in August 2007,[citation needed] when it re-enabled comments on its posts,[9] and implemented disemvoweling.[10]Gawker Media sites adopted disemvoweling as a moderation tool in August 2008.[11][12] On 30 October 2008, Time magazine listed disemvoweling as #42 of their "Top 50 Inventions of 2008".[13]
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."[14] Also, Boing Boing producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to types of behavior that are unacceptable.[15][needs update]
After Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013,[16] one of his ideas was to install a feature that allowed a reader to "disemvowel" an article they didn't enjoy, the idea being that another reader would have to pay to reinstate the vowels. Shailesh Prakash, the newspaper's chief product and technology officer, said "the idea didn't go far".[17]
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[citation needed]. 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."[18] 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.[19]
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.[20]
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.[21]
The technique has been facilitated by plug-infilters to automate the process. The first, for MovableType, was written in 2002;[22] others are available for WordPress[23] and other content management systems.
^"Personal". The Franklin Repository: 2. August 14, 1867 – via Newspapers.com. His manner is not in the least cockneyish—as he neither disemvowels his syllables nor asperates his H's.
^Thomas, Martyn (31 August 1990). "Risks Digest 10.37". comp.risks. Google Groups. Archived from the original on 22 October 2012. Retrieved 6 October 2009. Censored, even though disemvoweled (as in *br*dg*d or s*n*t*z*d)
^Nielsen Hayden, Teresa (19 November 2002). "Housekeeping". Making Light. Archived from the original on 7 January 2010. Retrieved 6 October 2009. I decided that since nobody was paying attention to PS's arguments anyway, and it's dreary having to scroll up and down past them, they'd be better shortened. So I took out the vowels.
^Hlavaty, Arthur D. (21 November 2002). "Comment 48". Archived from the original on 7 January 2010. Retrieved 6 October 2009.
^Nielsen Hayden, Teresa (4 September 2007). "Witchcraft practitioner wins Mega Millions lottery: Comment 33". Boing Boing. Archived from the original on 1 April 2009. Retrieved 6 October 2009. Disemvowelling. You can still read it if you want to work at it, but you don't read it automatically. I prefer it to deleting posts that have objectionable material in them. Sometimes, if it's just a phrase or sentence or paragraph that's the problem, I'll disemvowel that and leave the rest in plaintext.
