Welcome to Voldemorting!

Welcome to Voldemorting!

Voldemorting:Word of the day by BBC

When writers swap Trump for Cheeto, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.

"I'm so tired of all the bad news on birdsite."

Twitter aka Birdsite

"Yeah, there's just too much about The Cheeto."

US President Trump aka Cheeto

Cheeto and birdsite might not be common vocabulary, but the phrases are strangely interpretable. It's easy to jump from Cheeto to Donald Trump or from birdsite to Twitter. Even more understandable is the attitude that comes along for the ride: Somehow it's clear that someone who uses ornate synonyms isn't happy about either entity.

Cheeto, sometimes, is also known as #45 for US President Trump is the 45th President of the United States. 

Representing US President Trump #45 

But how is it that we're so quick to figure out the hidden meanings of these words? And what does it mean for communication in the internet age that we're increasingly drawn to elaborate synonyms?

Emily van der Nagel, a researcher, calls it Voldemorting.It is traced back to the Harry Potter books, where most characters are too afraid of Voldemort to say the name directly, instead replacing his name with euphemisms like "You Know Who" and "He Who Must Not Be Named". This practice starts as a superstition, but by the final book there’s a deeper purpose: The word Voldemort is revealed as a way of locating the resistance: “Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance.”

The internet practice of Voldemorting comes via a comment left by a user who made the connection as part of a discussion which refers celebrities without actually mentioning their names.

On the internet there's no such thing as a tracing spell, but there's something almost as effective: search algorithms. Plugging a distinctive name into a search box lets us track mentions around the web. We could set up a Google Alert to email us every time a website mentions our name, or as we get Facebook notifications when someone mentions our name in any of their posts.

Voldemorting: The act of never speaking the name of someone truly terrible. E.g. ‘Don’t bother writing a feedback for you can always Voldemorte those names!’

Vocabulary

Yet Voldemorting departs from the Harry Potter analogy. "You Know Who" and "He Who Must Not Be Named" are a small set of ominous phrases, while internet Voldemorting is often playful and cycles through infinite variations of newly coined words that includes single words for social media sites (birdhell, birdsite, birdworld, faceborg) and elaborate phrases like those found in the Detrumpify browser extension (Manchurian Combover, Empty Popcorn Bag Rotting in the Sun). In the books, Dumbledore says, "Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself." Van der Nagel counters: "On social media, Voldemorting has the potential to invert this power play."

The famous Fictional Character Voldemort 

Once you've been burned by these nefarious techniques, you might start hiding your keywords—preemptively adding asterisks or replacing the words altogether by Voldemorting.

Voldemort

This gets at a second important property of Voldemorting: It's not necessarily directly avoiding people, the way you might write a cryptic, passive-aggressive post about how some people are just so rude. It's about selecting a group to know exactly who or what you're talking about, while preventing a broader, unwanted audience from finding your post at all—even if you're not sure anyone’s looking for it. If one decides to tweet a negative thing about a celebrity, the same might not know whether this particular celebrity has a Beyhive to leap to their Twitter defense, but it might be worth Voldemorting the name just in case.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When we do Voldemorting, we naturally create something anti-SEO, which are less identifiable by SEO techniques.





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Try Voldemorting!

Try Voldemorting in your future texts!


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