Disemvoweling

Disemvoweling, disemvowelling (see doubled ''L''), or disemvowelment of a piece of alphabetic text is rewriting it with all the vowel letters elided. Disemvoweling is a common feature of SMS language as disemvoweling requires little cognitive effort to read, so it is often used where space is costly.

Example

This original sentence:

would, after being disemvowelled, look like this:

Etymology

The word ''disemvoweling'' is a portmanteau''. It was first notably used in the 1939 novel ''Finnegans Wake'' by James Joyce: "Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled"''.''

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''. "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''. This was termed ''disemvoweling'' by Arthur D. Hlavaty later in the same thread.

Nielsen Hayden joined the group blog ''Boing Boing'' as community manager in August 2007, when it re-enabled comments on its posts, and implemented disemvoweling. Gawker Media sites adopted disemvoweling as a moderation tool in August 2008. On 30 October 2008, ''Time'' magazine listed disemvoweling as #42 of their "Top 50 Inventions of 2008".

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." Also, ''Boing Boing'' producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to types of behavior that are unacceptable.

After Jeff Bezos acquired ''The Washington Post'' in 2013, 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".

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; others are available for WordPress and other content management systems.

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, or Scribd. Band names without vowels are Mstrkrft, MGMT, MNDR, Blk Jks, Sbtrkt, WSTRN, HMGNC, Strfkr, Kshmr, LNDN DRGS, LNZNDRF, PVT, RDGLDGRN, Dvsn, SWMRS, and Dwntwn. 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

References

External links

{{commons category, Disemvoweling

Internet terminology
Internet forum terminology
Censorship
Vowel letters
Obfuscation