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France rejects 'podcasting'

December 15, 2006

French radio presenters have a problem with podcasting - but it's nothing to do with technology, bandwidth or copyright. No, the problem they have is with the word itself. 'Podcasting', you see, isn't French.

Defending the language from foreign invasion is something of a cause célébre in France, it has to be said, but the disdain for podcasting is not about national pride: it's about being understood. If listeners can't tell what they're being offered, they're unlikely to head for the station's website to subscribe to new feeds.

Although the arrival of podcasting in the French language is something of a fait accompli, that didn't stop the French government from passing a decree in March to encourage the use of an alternative term: "la diffusion pour baladeur". Baladeur is French for portable music player, and spares the French from erroneously referring to any such device as an "iPod" or "Walkman," regardless of the actual brand, as native English speakers tend to do.

In some ways, "diffusion pour baladeur" makes more sense than the English word, and it lends itself quite well to other grammatical forms such as a podcast (une diffusion pour baladeur) or to podcast ("diffuser pour baladeur"). It might even catch on, as the government-mandated term for email ("courriel", from "courrier", mail, and "électronique", electronic) has done.

The French government doesn't just pluck new words like that out of thin air. The words are created by a panel of industrialists and savants, either from scratch or based on observations of evolving usage. The Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry has set up a Special Commission on Terminology and Neologisms in Electronic Communications to carry out such work. There are similar commissions for other domains, including computing, petrochemicals and medicine.

One of the reasons these panels exist is to ensure that everyone bidding for public works contracts calls a spade a spade, and not, for example, a human-powered hand-held digging implement. The consistent use of terminology is important to avoid misunderstandings that might lead to cost overruns.

I learned all this when I was invited to observe one of the commission's gatherings last week.

In a rather grand meeting room on the seventh floor of the ministry, overlooking the River Seine, about 30 English and French speakers sat down to exchange a few words over lunch.

The goal of the meeting was to discuss a number of new terms that the commission was considering, including "cercle de confiance" (circle of trust), "espace de confiance" (trusted environment) and "maîtrise de l'archivage" (records management), all of which met with near-unanimous approval.

However, somewhere between the entrée and dessert, discussion turned to "pharming", and it became apparent that some of those present just didn't get it.

"So how is this different from hacking?" asked one, while another wanted to know where the word came from.

Well, gentle reader, how would you explain?

I drew an analogy between robbing a bank by cutting a hole in the wall (hacking) and getting people to deposit their money in a fake bank by changing the signs in the street (pharming). That comforted them in their choice of translation, "usurpation de serveur" or server usurpation, but did nothing to explain the origin of the word, which in my dictionary is defined as the production of human pharmaceuticals in farm animals.

I have a feeling, though, that the curious spelling of pharming has the same origins as that of "phishing": the deliberate mistyping of certain words by the hacking community. You too can join them by substituting ph for f, 0 for O, 1 for L, 3 for E, 4 for A, 7 for T and peppering your dialogue with terms like "leet" (elite) and n00b (beginner).

Foreigners are apt to laugh at the French Academy for their belief that a language can be controlled by decree, but when the alternative is a linguistic abomination like pharming, whose etymology leaves no clue as to its intended meaning, I have to say I'm in favour of the French dirigiste method.

If we let pharming into the English dictionary in this new meaning, then I fear that we will be on the brink of a slippery slope, at the bottom of which security consultants try desperately to patch systems while elite French hackers, better educated because they are able to understand their correctly spelled technical documentation, run rings around them.

But how will they taunt their targets? One thing's for sure, they won't say: "Ph34r m3, 4 I M 1337."

Posted by: Peter Sayer

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Comments

Posted by db. on December 15, 2006 :

Let's either attempt to infuse German into the french language or even better..make French, American Slang!!

Posted by Just Me on December 15, 2006 :

And yet, their phrase for pharming isn't accurate either. One does not have to usurp a server in order to pharm, there are other methods.

Posted by Heurrgh! on December 15, 2006 :

I think the 'ph' comes from 'phreaking', a term which appeared in the 1970s by techies. It was used in the sense of 'to subvert', as these guys used design features and loopholes of electrical and early electronic telephone exchanges to make free calls or to hide their location as they made anonymous calls to 'freak-out' companies or public figures

Posted by Just Me on December 15, 2006 :

And yet, their phrase for pharming isn't accurate either. One does not have to usurp a server in order to pharm, there are other methods.

Posted by Psh on December 15, 2006 :

Come on... The French are wasting money on this. Ambiguities in language are a part of IT, and having some snot-nosed politicians making up "politically correct" terms for technologies or methodologies they can't even understand will bring nothing but more confusion.

Go eat a crepe and leave our language alone.

Posted by Phil on December 18, 2006 :

The "ph" in pharming is derived from the "ph" in phishing, which is derived from "phreaking," a term used by pre-Internet hackers to manipulate the phone system (thus, the "ph").

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