Carrion Luggage

Withering Fireballs

This article's a few years old, and it's from PC Gamer, a source I don't think I've ever quoted before. No, I don't follow them, even though I am a... wait for it... PC gamer. But this one's not about gaming.

    I just found out what Wi-Fi means and it's sending me  
It's almost certainly not what you think.

Wi-Fi is something most of us use every day. It's a miraculous technology that allows us to communicate and share large amounts digital information to multiple devices without the use of cables.

The great big machine that went BING and fixed my heart problem, that was miraculous technology. Wi-Fi? Just technology.

But what does it mean?

I know I do philosophy in here from time to time, but "what does it mean" is just too big a ques- Oh, you mean, what does "Wi-Fi" mean.

Wireless Fidelity? Wrong. Wireless Finder? Nope. Withering Fireballs? Not even close, my friend.

From now on, in my house, it's Withering Fireballs.

According to MIC   quoting this interview from 2005 by Boing Boing,   Wi-Fi doesn't mean any of these things, and in fact actually means basically nothing at all.

So here I am, quoting an article that quotes an article that quotes another (20 year old) article. Sure, I could have just gone to the original source, but where's the fun in that? Then I wouldn't have been able to make jokes about Withering Fireballs.

Here's my take: it means what it means. Every word has a meaning, except maybe for "meaningless."

Rather, Wi-Fi was a name settled on between a group now known as the Wi-Fi alliance and some brand consultants from Interbrand agency.

"Now known as?" One wonders what they were known as before they invented the term Wi-Fi. Let's look it up, shall we? "In 1999, pioneers of a new, higher-speed variant endorsed the IEEE 802.11b specification to form the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA)  "

WECA, now, that's a meaningless acronym because they're not called that anymore. I know a few people in Wicca, but that's a different thing.

Ten names were proposed by the brand agency, and in the end the group settled on Wi-Fi, despite the emptiness the name holds.

"Despite?" I'd have guessed "because of." You may not want your brand to connote other meanings. It can lead to confusion. Different story, but that's kind of what happened with .gif. The creator of the Graphics Interchange Format went to his grave insisting that it's pronounced with a soft g, and he was wrong. We're still arguing about it to this day, and .gifs are older than Wi-Fi.

"So we compromised and agreed to include the tag line 'The Standard for Wireless Fidelity' along with the name.

"This was a mistake and only served to confuse people and dilute the brand."

Like I said.

A word that many of us say potentially several times a day is actually straight up marketing nonsense.

Fun fact: in French, it's pronounced "wee-fee," which I find highly amusing. No relation to "oui."

At any rate, every word is made up. Some were made up more recently than others, is all. Some get passed around for a while and then fall out of favor, while others become Official Scrabble Words or whatever (I wonder if I'd get dinged for using "yeet" on a Scrabble board.)

Perhaps sometime in the future, a newer technology will replace what we know today as Wi-Fi. They'll try to give it a different name. We'll just keep calling it Wi-Fi. Maybe we'll even drop the hyphen, which seems to be the pattern for lots of made-up words. And the French will go on pronouncing it differently.