Premise vs. Premises

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Martha. This is Ross in San Antonio.

Hey, Ross. Welcome to the show.

How are you doing, buddy? What’s up?

Thanks for having me on.

Hey, Grant. How’s it going?

All right.

I guess this constitutes a piece of workplace jargon, and I’ve been looking forward to getting a definitive answer on the correct usage of the word premise versus premises when it comes to computing resources that may be on or off-site at your location.

Can you explain what those terms are?

Well, sure. I work in the cloud computing industry, and sometimes you have compute resources that can be at your location in a data center at your business place, or it could be contracted with a third party that has those compute resources off-site.

And I’m often hearing people use premise and premises kind of interchangeably.

And so sometimes people will say it’s off-premise, which to me sounds wrong.

It sounds like it’s off-topic.

So they might say this suffer package is hosted off-premise.

We’ve got to do something else.

Exactly.

And they’re meaning it’s not on site.

Correct.

Okay.

Now I’ve also heard it shortened down to on-prem and off-prem.

Oh, really?

On-prem and off-prem, sure.

That might be just the shorthand.

But in today’s busy world, who’s got time for the extra two syllables?

So what’s bothering you sounds like premises as a singular doesn’t really work the way they think it works, right?

Right, because anyone who’s tried to drink a beer on a 7-Eleven property knows that consumption of alcohol is not allowed on this premises.

Right, exactly.

Oh, there’s a couple of really confusing things happening here.

I’m going to drive toward an answer as fast as I can, all right?

Let’s see how it goes.

Premises has, since the 1600s, has met a location or a site.

It comes from legal jargon related to the ownership of property.

And along the way, we allow in English premises to be used with singular and plural verb forms.

So you can say these are our premises or this is a premises where we don’t permit that.

It’s really interesting.

And so when cloud computing came along, we had a strange thing happen, what we call in linguistics, a back formation, where now that we had intense computing happening off-site, we needed a term for the computing that was happening on-site.

So people came up with the on-premises computing.

Unfortunately, as you note, they decided that premises no longer needed to be plural and have the ES because there was only one site.

And by comparison to the term on-site, they decided to make it singular.

So you could have an on-premise computing.

Now, the difficulty with this is there’s a couple of really strange things happening here.

The one thing I think is worth pointing out is I think that they did it incorrectly and they misunderstood English on the way to that.

And you’re completely right, Ross.

They did the wrong thing.

But when I say they, I am talking about thousands of people who use it this way now and have since at least 2005.

So we’re talking about a 10-year usage that, unfortunately, we’re never going to be able to stomp out until the next new cloud computing or on-premises buzzword comes along and replaces it.

I like prim.

On-prem works.

I like on-prem.

That solves the problem really easily.

Don’t you think, Ross, that on-prem kind of solves it because you’ve got a nice little bit of tidy jargon that is so distanced from its roots it doesn’t matter that they got it wrong in between?

Well, great.

That’s some vindication there.

And thanks for keeping this conversation on premise.

Yeah.

I guess it is.

Yeah, it’s strange, right, though?

It’s really interesting.

We see this a few times happen in English.

My favorite one happens in gaming, which is going on for like 20 or 30 years where people misunderstood the word versus as the conjugation of a verb to verse somebody, meaning to contest or to challenge or to play against.

And I think a similar thing is happening here.

People mis-parsed premises and said, oh, of course, we’ll just make that single.

We got just one.

Yeah, it’s got an S.

Without really thinking about all the other times that they encountered the word premises, they didn’t ever realize, wait a second, I never hear this in the singular form.

Never, ever.

Not in that way, no.

Not to refer to a location or property or a site, no.

Anyway, yeah, but you’re in a jargon-rich industry, right, Ross?

I sure am.

Yeah, it’s like you’ve got to shovel it out from under your desk every day.

Oh, recycle it. Come on, recycle it.

You’ve got to muck out the jargon stalls.

But yes, we invent new words every day.

I’m a technical writer and a content strategist.

I’m on the front lines.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you have to call us again then with some more of those.

Yeah, do please.

Because I’ll be interested in what replaces this slang or this jargon because it always happens.

I’d be happy to keep an ongoing conversation with you guys.

Yeah.

Sounds good, Ross.

Thanks, Ross.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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