Language of technology stirs debate

Our recent list of “12 words you can never say in the office” sure hit a raw nerve with readers.

The story was a lighthearted look at how buzzwords change over time. From the George Carlin reference in the headline to the embedded link to our IT geezer quiz, the story was meant to give readers a laugh about how phrases come in and out of favor among tech vendors and users.

Our list included a dozen words and phrases that were once hyped by tech vendors, consultants, industry analysts and the media (yes, Network World included) but aren’t as widely used today. We also came up with replacement terms that seem to be gaining popularity.

But some of our readers – particularly the readers of Business Week and Yahoo News, both of which syndicated the article – took the list way more seriously than we intended. We’ve been flooded with feedback, much of it critical, some of it positive.

In fairness, there’s one term that we flubbed, and that’s “intranet.” Readers strongly defended the term, saying that while “intranet” isn’t nearly as broadly used as it was in the ‘90s, it’s still used in IT shops to refer to internal HTML pages.

“I understand when you say that most don't use [the terms intranet and extranet] like they did in the 90s, however they have since mutated into different meaning,” writes reader Steve in Seattle. “An intranet now is basically an internal web page that only locally authenticated internal network users can get to. Granted, this depends on the security of your internal network, but the term intranet is used all the time.”

Further, we suggested using “VPN” as a replacement term, and that was a mistake. We understand what a VPN is, often defined as private IP traffic tunneled over the public Internet. But the term VPN is also being used in a generic sense to refer to an organization’s private IP network. Readers feel strongly that VPN should not be misused in this way and that we should encourage the use of the term “private network” instead.

“While it may be a little bit dated to refer to the internal network as an intranet, it is just plain incorrect to call it a VPN,” wrote reader Darren. “It's an actual private network, and there is just not a cool, hip term for it.”

We completely agree, and have changed the original article accordingly.

The rest of the criticism seemed to stem from a misunderstanding about the story itself. The point of the story was to talk about language, not about the underlying technology to which it refers.

For example, we never said that the World Wide Web is obsolete (thank goodness!); we meant that nobody bothers saying all three words anymore. When was the last time you heard someone say, “I’ll look that up on the World Wide Web”? Instead they refer to the “Internet” or the “Web.”

The term “Web surfing” still seems to be in use in some locations, including California (naturally!), but many readers said they prefer “Web browsing,” as we suggested. Most of our readers agreed that end users are starting to say “Google” as a generic verb to describe looking up information on a search engine.