Q&A with Erica Brozovsky on the Backstory of Common Tech Words

Q. A lot of us fly through our lives not thinking about words and how we say them and what that says about us. Why did you decide to research and teach about these topics?

A. I’ve always been a big fan of words and language in general—I was a voracious reader as a child and still enjoy reading in my limited free time. I was a linguistics major in college, and it gave me a way to explain and understand the differences in the way people talk. When the opportunity came to go to grad school, I jumped on it. In my experience, the best way to learn something thoroughly is through teaching it. Students will ask questions that make you, as the instructor, really think critically and that will challenge your views or interpretations, and it’s such a fun and intellectually engaging way to get deeper. I’m also really excited about language and linguistics and want to share that with everyone.

Q. Can you tell us about the backstory on some common tech terms? For instance, where did the term browser and phrase surfing the web come from?

A. The word browser in the computational internet context goes back to the 1960s, which seems pretty early, given that the first actual web browser wasn’t created until 1990. The internet was around at that time, just not accessible to the general public. But the term itself originated as an acronym. It stands for “BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval.”

Surfing dates back to the early ’90s. It’s usually attributed to librarian Jean Armour Polly, who wrote an article in 1992 for fellow librarians explaining the internet and how to use it—she wanted a pithy metaphor for the fun and chaos of navigating the online world. As it turns out, her mouse pad happened to have a surfer with the words “information surfer” on it. It sparked an idea, and surfing the internet was born. Around the same time, a comic book called The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy came out. CERF is an acronym for the California Education and Research Federation. Captain Internet and her sidekick CERF Boy surfed around, on an actual surfboard, answering internet cries for help. 

Q. How did deceptive online attacks come to be known as phishing?

A. Phishing with a ‘ph’ is allegedly based on the homophone fishing. Think: trawling for sensitive information from a sea of internet users. It’s attributed to hacker Khan C. Smith sometime in the mid-1990s.
The ‘ph’ is a nod to phreaking, which was a way of hacking telephones to avoid paying long-distance phone charges.

Q. How about spam? 

A. Spam is one of those annoying, ubiquitous parts of internet life. The word comes from an iconic Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch where a horde of Vikings enters a café, and they repeat the menu item “Spam” over and over, drowning out any other sound in the café, much like spam pops up in our inboxes. 

Q. How do you incorporate sociolinguistic concepts—and your research experience—into the writing and rhetoric courses you teach?

A. I think it’s impossible for any instructor not to include their pet interests and research areas in their teaching. When I come up with off-the-cuff examples, they’re based on what I know and what I am interested in. Also, a lot of effective research lies in observing, so I like to let my students do a lot of the talking and we, as a class, get to analyze what comes next. 

Specifically, in my courses at WPI, I’m focused on letting the students’ voices come through in their writing, which is a very descriptivist choice (as opposed to prescriptivism, where there’s one right way to do something). I need to make sure they know the so-called rules or standards per se when it comes to formal academic writing, but I also encourage them to speak from their own experience and worldview, because it’s unique. I don’t want to read the same essay written the same way 20 times. I want 20 unique essays that only each of those specific students could have written.

Also, once you learn the rules, you get to break them. That’s paraphrasing Picasso. He actually said something like, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” 

To hear more about Brozovsky’s research and teaching, listen to an extended version of this conversation, available at www.wpi.edu/listen. Brozovsky also hosts the PBS web series Otherwords.