A recent call from a video editor looking for a fancy word to refer to extracting video from a computer drew a huge response from listeners trying to help. The suggestions they offered include cull, evict, expunge, expede, disassemble, de-vid, and (in case they were working on Windows operating systems) defenestrate. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Defenstrate”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Every once in a while we get a call that just makes our email box explode and our phone rings off the hook.
All lines on red.
Yes, yes, they’re just calls that somehow connect with listeners or they want to help a fellow listener.
Who was it this time?
This was, remember the call from Mitch in Florida?
Oh, he’s the video editor.
Yes, he is a video editor, and he was looking for a word that sounded expensive to try to designate this thing that he did with video.
And you understand the technical stuff better than I do.
Yeah, so it was the opposite of ingest.
When you bring video into a system, you are ingesting it into the system.
But he wanted a word that wasn’t about just dumping the video, but it was maybe extracting the video so that you get the final product or you get a product that you can share.
Right, because it’s not exactly deleting, right?
It’s some kind of more specialized.
And it’s not always exporting either.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Now, why in the world this struck a chord with listeners?
I have no idea.
What are we looking at here?
Hundreds?
Maybe even more than a thousand?
Yeah.
Yes.
And I have just culled a few of them.
In fact, cull, John Foster suggested the word cull, which I kind of like.
So he culls the video when he moves.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we also, you mentioned extract.
We heard that.
We heard evict, extirpate, expunge, expede.
And then there was disassemble, disentangle, disassimilate, deassimilate, deintegrate, devid.
And somebody said if you’re working on Windows machines, you could say defenestrate, which I kind of like.
But they’re probably working on Macs, wouldn’t you guess?
A lot of people called with suggestions from the medical field.
Jane was watching Grey’s Anatomy that very night and thought of us because they were talking about resecting a tumor, which is sort of a difficult and risky procedure.
And she thought that maybe resecting the video would work.
And we heard from Stephen Holloway, who’s an RN, and he suggested lavage, which also sounds sort of like a $200 word.
So this is when you squirt saline solution on the site of surgery or something?
You clean out an organ, yeah.
Yeah.
We also got a couple of suggestions involving the word deaccession.
Andrew from the Erie County Public Library in Pennsylvania said, in libraries, museums, and the archiving world, we use deaccession when we’re removing something from an established collection.
Yeah, that’s what they use in museums as well.
When you take something out of your collections to sell or to give to another museum, or just because it’s a fake and it’s not what you thought it was.
You deaccession it?
You deaccession it.
Oh, deaccession it.
Yeah, you deaccession it.
You don’t deaccess it.
Okay.
So that’s the verb.
And somebody else referred to that same process more informally as media flushing.
Media flushing.
Outstanding.
Yeah.
Well, Mitch, you’ve got a lot to work with here.
All these terms for the variety of ways you might take video out of your system so that it sounds billable to a client.
That’s the key, isn’t it?
And I think the other thing to take away from this is that our listeners are so helpful.
I know, right?
Right.
We have a community.
This is how it works.
It takes a village.
To make a language.
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