Disemvoweling, disemvowelling (see doubled L), or disemvowelment of a piece of alphabetic text is rewriting it with all the vowel letters removed. This original sentence:
Contents
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogwould, after being disemvowelled, look like this:
Th qck brwn fx jmps vr th lzy dgDisemvoweling is a common feature of SMS language.
Because disemvoweling makes text legible only through significant cognitive effort, it is used by moderators on internet forums, newsgroups and blogs as a way to limit the effectiveness of unwanted postings or comments, such as rudeness or criticism. Disemvoweling maintains some transparency, both of the act and the underlying word, which would not be the case if the entire offending post is deleted. The word disemvoweling is a portmanteau combining vowel and disembowel.
The word was used with precisely this meaning in the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake (p. 515).
History
A technique dubbed splat out was used by Usenet moderators to prevent flamewars, by substituting a "splat" (i.e., asterisk) for some letters, often the vowels, of highly charged words in postings. Examples include Nazi→N*z*, evolution→*v*l*t**n, gun control→g*n c*ntr*l. "The purpose is not to make the word unrecognizable but to make it a mention rather than a use." The term "disemvoweling" —attested from 1990 — was occasionally used for the splat-out of vowels.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used the vowel-deletion technique in 2002 for internet forum moderation on her blog Making Light. This was termed disemvoweling by Arthur D. Hlavaty later in the same thread.
Nielsen Hayden joined the group blog Boing Boing as community manager in August 2007 , when it re-enabled comments on its posts, and implemented disemvoweling. Gawker Media sites adopted disemvoweling as a moderation tool in August 2008. On 30 October 2008, TIME magazine listed disemvoweling as #42 of their "Top 50 Inventions of 2008".
Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing, said of the practice, "the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized." Also, Boing Boing producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to types of behavior that are unacceptable.
Criticism
In July 2008, New York Times reporter Noam Cohen criticized disemvoweling as a moderation tool, citing a June 2008 dispute about the deletion of all posts on Boing Boing that mentioned sex columnist Violet Blue . In the Boing Boing comment threads resulting from this controversy, Nielsen Hayden used the disemvoweling technique. Cohen noted that disemvoweling was "Not quite censorship, but not quite unfettered commentary either." A subsequent unsigned case study on online crisis communication asserted that "removing the vowels from participants’ comments only increased the gulf between the editors and the community" during the controversy.
Matt Baumgartner, a blogger at the Albany Times Union, reported in August 2009 that the newspaper's lawyers had told him to stop disemvoweling comments.
Implementation
Nielsen Hayden originally disemvoweled postings manually, using Microsoft Word. Because the letter Y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, there are a variety of ways to treat it. Nielsen Hayden's policy was never to remove Y, in order to maintain legibility.
The technique has been facilitated by plug-in filters to automate the process. The first, for MovableType, was written in 2002; others are available for WordPress and other content management systems.