Word of the Week: Disemvoweling

Disemvoweling (also disemvowelling): Removing all the vowels from offensive text posted on the internet by a troll, spammer, or other vandal. The reference is to disemboweling, or evisceration.

According to the NationMaster encyclopedia:

The disemvoweled text can still be read, or rather puzzled out; but it is clearly marked as deprecated, and is no longer susceptible to being automatically read by every passer-by who happens to glance at it.

The technique of disemvoweling appears to have been invented in 2002 by Teresa Hayden Nielsen to defuse offensive comments left by Philip Shopshire on her blog, Making Light. She explained her actions at comment #40; at comment #48, Arthur Hlvaty dubbed the practice "disemvoweling."

Disemvoweling also comes up in "The Trolls Among Us," an August 3, 2008, story by Mattathias Schwartz in the New York Times Magazine. From page 6 of the online article:

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.

Other troll-related words used in the Times article: lulz ("a corruption of 'LOL' or 'laugh out loud,' “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium") and malwebolence, a blend of "malevolence" and "web." According to the article, troll was first used in the late 1980s to describe someone who intentionally disrupts internet communities.

Comments

[TootsNYC]

I don't quite "disemvowel" words, but I have created dummy text by changing every "e" to a "z" in the "last issue's story" that the art dept. pasted into the layout.

[...tom...]

...
"having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message."

Th frst tm ncntrd ths ws rlly flmmxd. Bt ftr rsnng t th cs, nd rsn, t strck m s bng vry ffctv tchnq.

ntrstng.

...tm...