E-Words

Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

In the mid-1980s, the Internet required a whole set of new words, sometimes because of new concepts, like website, internet, and infobahn, and sometimes to distinguish new uses of words, like e-mail, spam, e-tail, virus — and text as a verb.

All of these words emerged in a rush. I remember the first time Prodigy blocked a posting of mine because they thought it was “spam.” I had no idea what they meant, since it wasn’t a canned ham byproduct. But apparently it was something despicable.

I also knew that the Prodigy moderators were power-mad morons (though I mean that in the nicest possible way).

Prodigy decided that they wanted their online culture to be nothing like real-world conversations. They demanded that all posts had to be relentlessly on-topic.

Imagine sitting around a living room, and one guy who isn’t actually in the conversation keeps interrupting people, saying, “Sorry, off-topic.” And after getting interrupted a few times, you are told, “Sorry, you’re banned from this conversation. You can stay and listen, but you can’t speak anymore.”

For me, the height of absurdity was in the Prodigy area labeled “Orson Scott Card.” I was the topic, so it seemed to me that any damn thing I felt like posting in that area was, by definition, on-topic.

No-o-o-o-o.

In fact, when someone posted the question, “Where is Card doing any signings in the near future?” and I, naturally, replied, “I’ll be signing at the Barnes & Noble in Orem, Utah, on the 30th of October,” my post was deleted and I was given a warning about posting “personal messages.”

So I learned to speak of myself in third-person only: “Orson Scott Card will be signing at Cosmic Aeroplane in Salt Lake City.” (A message I could never have posted, since Cosmic Aeroplane was out of business before my career got to a point where anybody asked me to come and sign books. At least I know I didn’t cause it to close.)

But the high school and college students who live on their phones today have no memory of a world without those words. A lot of them probably have no knowledge of Spam as a food product. Nor do they have any memories of the idiocy of conversation management under Prodigy.

I remember when grownups were still adjusting to the ways developed by adolescents to use the capabilities of mobile phones (or, as the usage has become, “mobiles,” with “phone” not needing to be mentioned at all). “They’re at a party, sitting on the same basement sofa, texting to each other instead of actually talking.” It seemed absurd to adults.

Then I was at a cocktail party at Comi-Con in San Diego, talking to a movie producer, unable to hear a word she said unless she cupped both hands around her mouth and my ear. Texting would have made sense.

And then my kids explained. “In high school, if anybody sees you talking to each other, sitting on a couch at a party, you might as well be engaged. You’re absolutely having a ‘thing.’”

My problem was that I’m a touch typist. Watching kids poking messages into the virtual keyboards on their phones, I was in awe. Because my fingers always mashed more than one character at a time. The keyboard-reading algorithms have improved over time — they now ignore many, though not all, random keypresses.

But I still hate entering texts into a phone. It’s too slow, and Autocorrect is like an evil poltergeist haunting me, constantly taking the right word and replacing it with a hideously wrong one.

I use the virtual keyboard on my tablet, though, because I spend a lot of time in bed, reading and posting on my email and on Quora. So all my Quora posts are entered with my right index finger, which is slow, but I can do it lying on my back in bed. I also get a serious e-ache in my right shoulder, from holding a pose with my arm and finger.

The generation of new words and terms for our Internet tasks and machinery hasn’t stopped, but there are still a lot of words that might by useful, if we only had them.

We already have “e-mail” or, more recently, “email,” there being no further need for the hyphen. The “e” was added to make it a computer term.

But some nice words already have an “e,” so the hyphen will be needed to convey the new electronic usage.

My favorite new-meaning e-word is “e-pistle.” Many readers are familiar with the epistles of Paul and a few others as the back part of the New Testament. They know that an epistle is simply a letter, a bit of mail, but with overtones of a seriousness of purpose.

However, with “email” already a current word, the idea of an electronic epistle is covered. So what else could e-pistle mean? In other words, without the “e,” what is a “pistle”?

Being human and male, the first thing that comes to my mind is: urinal. I mean, isn’t “pistle” a perfectly good additional word for a “urinal”? Maybe it could be spelled slightly differently — pissile, to rhyme with missile, or pissle, by analogy with hassle. But pistle also sight-rhymes with whistle, so nobody will be in any doubt about how to pronounce it.

But with pistle meaning urinal, what in the world would an e-pistle be? An electronic urinal? I don’t see a clear computer-related meaning.

So then I thought, “trolling” has never been a good word, because, far from conjuring up a troll under the bridge when the billy goats Gruff want to cross over, to me trolling instead suggests fishing.

So maybe we could express the idea of calling a deliberately nasty comment on somebody’s post an e-pistle. “He followed me around Facebook, sticking e-pistles on everything I wrote, especially on cute pictures of cats, squirrels, and my grandchildren.”

I bet you have all read Frindle, by Andrew Clements, in which a kid thinks up a new word for “pencil,” and it gets picked up and used. It’s a delightful book, but by the time I read it, I already knew that new words get adopted because they’re needed.

I know, all kinds of words get repurposed in slang, like bad for good, phat, and (from my youth) bitchin’ for good. But the rule still holds. When you need a stronger word for “good,” you repurpose another word that does not mean “good.”

Or even one that already meant good, but had fallen out of fashion. When I was in college, a friend in our theatre group, Doug Voet, suddenly started using the word wonderful by giving it a special, kind of excited-sounding emphasis. Pretty soon, even when Doug wasn’t present — no, especially when Doug wasn’t there — we would use wonderful the way he did.

At the time, “wonderful” had become stale and meaningless. It was usually used sarcastically. Somebody does a mediocre job, and we’d say, “Wonderful, what’s next?” But suddenly, thanks to Doug, wonderful had become a fresh word, full of rich emotional overtones.

(I looked up Doug Voet on Google to see what he might be up to. Alas, the most recent news was that when Andy Gibb was fired from a Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazine Technicolor Dream Coat in 1983, Doug Voet was the understudy who was to replace him for the near future.

(But, to take away any thrill this might have brought to Doug, the notice said that a “star” would soon be engaged to replace Gibb in the role. In my mind, having seen him perform and, especially, heard him sing, Doug was already a star just waiting to be discovered. Apparently this would not be his big chance.

(Perhaps more skilled users of Google could find more recent news of Doug’s activities. The obituary of a Donald Voet mentioned a son Doug, who might be the man I knew, but that’s as close as I could come without searching through dozens of irrelevant pages, which I am too lazy to do.

(Besides, too many of my most talented theatre friends have already died, and I didn’t want to find out anything like that about Doug. My life is better for believing that Doug is alive somewhere, doing wonderful things.)

Pistle might be a more entertaining slang alternative to “urinal,” and e-pistle might be a good replacement for, or shade-of-meaning variant of, troll — or a good word for the message a troll posts online.

But mainly, I just think e-pistle is a great computer word waiting to be put to use. Though as an understudy for the role of troll, it might have a momentary existence outside of this column. That would make me smile a bit.

Meanwhile, I have to take my lapdesk off my lap so I can get up and use the pistle we recently installed in our master bathroom, replacing the tub we had never used in the thirty-five years of living in this house.

Having a pistle in the house is a lovely convenience — and that, too, is a word I would like to have spread. Even if merely as a word for a domestic urinal, a urinal in the home instead of in a public restroom. Why not?