Teaching You Tech Terms Today

It’s a very typical thing for americans to use brand names for objects, i wonder if it is because of the extra heavy advertisments in the us.

Xspresooooooo

lol

Things that bother me:
- Split infinitives (i.e. “To boldly go” = “To go boldly”)
- Personification of inanimate objects (i.e. referring to a car as “she”)
- People who can spell huge words like “inanimate” and “personification” fine, but screw up on small words like “viewers”.
- I don’t think I can apply coupon code CHRIS to my GoDaddy purchse, as I made it two years ago. But I’ll sure toss that in for the renewal.

We all have cell phones, so come on, let’s get real…..

referring to the desktop pc as a cpu.
calling remote desktop the name of their most used application.
saying something crashed as a catch all for any problem they encounter.

the biggest thing that I hate is when people don’t read the messages a pc gives them and will then complain about the problem without having the info as to what it was!
(biggest culprit is not paying attention to what an NDR tells you!)

The one that drives me crazy more than any other is when people called desktop wallpaper a “screensaver.”

BUSH USES THE google

English lessons from an American, it’s like getting French lessons from the Chinese - dreadful!

I had an English teacher so conservative that he spelled phone with an apostrophe (’phone) to remind us all that it was short for telephone.

Chris, it’s only in a world of Geeks and pedantic English teachers would “cell” give way to “mobile device.” You’re paddling upstream on this.

People don’t say cell phone or cellular phone, they say cell. (as in call me on my cell) Cell is a nnappy one-syllable term for mobile phone. Even if it has outgrown its technological derivation. If we’re talking about a multi-function mobile device, we might tack on an extra syllable and call it a smart phone. Can you cite any case where a one-syllable word has been replaced in common speech by a four-syllable phrase?

As for PalmPilot, it was established because it was introduced as a single word with an interCap. It’s fading fast because nobody uses a non-connecting PDA anymore. But nobody (except Palm marketing) says Palm Treo. People say Treo.

Confession: Inconsistent with everything above, I’ve replaced the default “sent from my iPhone” sig with “sent from a mobile device.” But that’s cause I occasionally consult for a company that makes a competitive line of Windows Mobile 6 smart phones, and I’d rather not annoy them with constant reminders that I don’t use their products.

Hi Chris… I Agree With NODDYFISCHER… I Dont Think There Is Anything In The World As Anoying As A American Giving English Lessons, Specially If You Happen To Be English… However, 90% Of English People I Meet Also Cant Talk It Propperley, ‘Init’ For Isent It And ‘Aint’ For Is Not… Anyway, Who Cares? I Don’t… !!EXPRESSO!! IS CORRECCT! HAHA

here in europe, there’s a disgusting trend of calling our mobiles “mobes”.
as far back as I can remember, our mobile phones have always been called mobiles in the uk.

That reminds me of Java vs JavaScript. I really can’t take people who think that JavaScript is the same as Java.
Why does the iPhone not have Java support? Oh, because it’s old, everybody uses JavaScript now. That’s just lame to say..

You guys are being stereotypical. I’m an American, and I have a Masters in English as well. I speak English perfectly while at the same time being fluent in Spanish, French, Russian, and Arabic. So don’t stereotype please.

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Nice topic,thank you really.ın Turkıye for example we call soft paper napkins by a vrand name ’selpak’,women’s peds ‘orkid’.But we call wireless phones with a simple word ‘cep’ (pronounce like ***)it means ‘pocket’.

That was a good video
We should call technology by its proper name
My only issue is a lot of time when you are on the internet,you have 3 groups of people
(1)those who curse (2)those who never curse (3) those who use replacement words for the curse words,Did it dawn on them We KNOW what they are saying?
Thats just me though…..everyone has their pet peeves, and mine is replacement words.

In the UK we just call them mobiles, mobile phones or just phones. Nobody calls them cell phones and never have. They have always been called Mobile Phones all my life.

Woot for UK

This one is obvious, in general people call MP3 players iPod’s - So freakin annoying!!!! And they think the computer is Windows and nothing else :)

i hate when people call a router a rooter.

Did the Mountain Man in Deliverance have a cell phone, mobile device,or simply … an IPhone? He had neither. He had a “toothless roto rooter AND he demonstrated with exquisite perfection how it worked on Ned Beaty. Now that’s what I called wired … a man well ahead of his his time.

Chris Pirillo »Teaching You Tech Terms TodayPosted 101 minutes ago

h2glitch: the correct pronunciation of router in the electronic sense is “rooter”, since a “router” is something you use in a woodwork shop ;)

3 cheers for the english language and its confusion on how it wants words to sound ;)

Yea like How people call the Computer Tower a Modem, yea back in dial-up days which still exist as a standard, people i talk to just out of the box call it a modem, and the people that say that have DSL or cable which is a whole another box. and i point out that the modem is the modem and the computer tower is the computer tower.

Harlan

@ H2Glitch2007 - it is creating a route for the communication signal. Stick an “R” on the end, and pronounce it “ROOTER”

@ Harlan - if we’re becoming fussy about pronunciation, surely you should spell modem in CAPITALS - MODEM - it’s short for Modulator-Demodulator.

It annoys me when people spell Internet with a small “i”

It drives me CRAZY when people spell disk as disc, or disc as disk.

It sends me round the bend when people call a computer tower a hard drive.

It drives me up the wall when people think that clearing off some programs and photos gives them more memory, or that adding memory gives them more room to store photos (unless they’re using flash cards ;) )

A TiVo is a PVR. A DVD is a Digital VERSATILE DISC (not VIDEO and not DISK)

www is not the Internet. Outlook is not email. The mouse is not a remote control, nor is the monitor a TV (thanks grandpa!)…

But the worst thing people ignore about technology, and the thing I wish they would learn most, is what DRM is - and why you should rip CDs to a non-DRM format such as unprotected MP3s, rather than just loading up iTunes and throwing your CD collection at it.

sorry… wrong video. stupid youtube.

i was hoping for more tbh!!!

lol
chris lost his mind
go chris!!!!

Sounds like Chris(yes, THIRD PERSON!) is having what will from here on will be known as a ‘pirillo’ moment - davideo:->

I never knew that about a cell phone. I’m going to ask people “Hey can I use your mobile phone?” Mobile device sounds too weird. Saying it’s a phone doesn’t mean it’s not a device, a phone is a device.

its allways been a mobile in england.

hey chris i have two questions for u… do u make a lot of money from your media exposure?…. what the **** r those flashing lights on the wall? these r legitmate queries from an australian

Hi Chris

I have a problem with the pronunciation of the word router. I believe it should be pronounced “rooter”. When the Steelers beat the Browns 56 to nothing it’s called a rout not “root”. I 95 is the route, pronounced “root” not pronounced as in the words bout or pout. Set me straight.

The last time I checked, mobile phone calls, when one is moving, are handed off from one antenna to another. Each antenna defines a coverage area for that antenna, in other words, a ‘cell.’ So, it’s still a ‘cellular’ phone call *regardless* of the _signal modulation type_ being employed, be it CDMA, GSM, or otherwise. It’s not one large wireless end-to-end connected, or meshed, constantly-connected grid. Geez, Chris, just say *no* to caffeine, willya??

In Germany we call them “Handy(s)”

Since we’re sniveling about how people abuse the King’s English, I’ll throw in my $.02 worth.

The most misused and misunderstood grammatical feature of English is the apostrophe. An apostrophe serves two purposes:
1. To indicate possession, e.g., This is Chris’s website.
2. To create a contraction of a noun/pronoun with a verb, e.g., “It’s a good website” - “It” + “is” becomes “It’s.” Contractions are handled so badly by so many people; I try to avoid them in my writing.

An apostrophe is NEVER used to indicate a plural condition.
An example of this is at the top of the article:
“Cell phone’s aren’t cellular anymore”

However, the most egregious apostrophe errors is a result of English’s horrible, convoluted grammar. It would seem logical that - since the apostrophe’s primary purpose is to indicate possession - that “it’s” could be used properly as a possessive. Alas, it is not so. The possessive form of “it” is “its.”

Go figure.

Proofreaders (remember when there were such people) and editors have pummeled me so many times for getting caught in the grammatical trap of “‘its” vs. “it’s” vs. “it is”….. when I see someone else make that mistake, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard (remember when there were chalkboards?)

When apostrophe-related mistake’s appear on a sign - in public - I get an urge to commit a felony. (The err in “mistakes” is intentional)

Your Support Website. You can comment here or there.   Show Notes “Just like the word espresso is often mispronounced, so are a lot of tech words mispronounced, and misused.”Full Show Notes Here

ATM Machine!!! stands for Automatic Telling Machine Machine

call it ATM or Automatic Telling Machine

how about PAT test?

Portable Appliance Test er, test… it’s a poorly constructed acronym!

Lets try to say no to these things that elicit mistakes, surely they are the grammatical form of entrapment ;)

I always thought of cell as meaning small… cell phone = small phone. Mobile is a better word, but I do not tend to even think of cellular anymore.

Who still uses a Palm??

In Britain we use the term mobile phone

you mean england.

in scotland we say “mobile” not mobile phone, not sure what the welsh say for that word,

The “flashing lights on his wall” are or is a binary clock. IF you don’t know what a binary clock is, wiki it.

i hate when poeple call mp3 players, mp3s’s, oh man i lost my mp3, well godownlaod it again, no that thing that makes soudns, OH, MORONS

so do i now call my dog a “k-9/foot warmer”

aha good point about the pop and coke thing, me being from the UK we actually do call our drinking liquids pop

Equally annoying to me is when folks call *anything* that plays mp3s an “ipod.” Everything that you blow your nose into isn’t a Kleenex, every adhesive bandage that you put on a boo-boo isn’t a Band-Aid, and everything that plays mp3s isn’t a frackin’ ipod… Geez…

are we talking the Queens english.. or american english :p

bloody sidewalk. :p

.. where the hell in the uk are you from.. we dont call our drink POP.. FIZZY DRINKING .. get it right bruv.

Hmm. I’m probably gonna still call my cell phone a cell phone even if it doesn’t use cellular towers.

After all, we call this thing we’re typing on a “computer,” even though we do very little computing on it.

I heard sometime ago that gigabyte was commonly
pronounced with a hard “g” instead of a soft “g”. Any truth to that?

Yes, the soft vs hard ‘g’ is still found in common usage, and technically proper. If you caught the original ‘Back to the Future’ movie, you’ll recall the reference to 1.21 jig-a-watts there. Even though it’s allowed you still might get giggled at by someone who disagrees, if you care about that sort of thing.

Remember though, that a dictionary merely reports or reflects what a word means, or how a word is found to be used in society at a particular point in time. So when one encounters a word, they can attempt to determine what it meant in the conversation where it was heard, or the document in which it was used. Over time, dictionary entries are fluid, and will change. It isn’t meant to be an authoritative source on what it does or doesn’t mean. The dictionary entry comes *after* usage in society, instead of the other way around.

I saw an interview with the Editor-in-Chief at Merriam-Webster several years ago, and she addressed the same misunderstanding as well.

“Pity the Fool”