I recently finished Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon, and noticed that numerous characters abbreviated the word computer as 'puter in everyday speech. I have never heard that done, and was wondering if anyone else has? It sounds rather odd to me.
numerous characters abbreviated the word computer as 'puter in everyday speech
This sort of observation requires very careful listening. We tend to fill in blank spaces in the sound stream according to what we expect. <Computer> => <c'mputer> is a small step. The <m> will then easily merge with the <p> and the <c> being unvoiced will easily become inaudible. Since we are used to these processes occurring we will easily fill in the sounds in post production audio centers in our brains.
There is a computer cable company called CompuCableŽ. Normally this would be pronounced with the primary accent on the first syllable, but if you shift it to the second syllable...
I heard this 15 years ago, before I had ever seen or used a computer, from my assistant, an early computer geek. He used it as a sort of affectionate term, and pronounced it "pooter".
I heard this 15 years ago, before I had ever seen or used a computer, from my assistant, an early computer geek. He used it as a sort of affectionate term, and pronounced it "pooter".
Yes! I had a friend, also a geek, who called it "pooter". That's the only time I've ever actually heard it.
my kids call it my 'puter', but only because they can't yet pronounce it properly. the most common permutation i've heard, in jest (though appropos) is "confuser".
As Arthur Godfrey, a popular radio peronality in the thirties said when he heard the name of a town in Massachusetts called "Barnstable" - that's a pee-yew name.
I've never seen 'puter with an apostrophe, but puter is common enough among geeks, though always playfully, never as the standard term. It's just a lopping of the first syllable, not a slurring.
Now I've just consulted the Jargon File (a very good and comprehensive survey of geek terms) and it's not in there, so I'll have to guess. There is (was) a thing called a transputer, which is a kind of chip with a certain innovative architecture. My understanding was that puter was originally either a synonym of this or a generalization into a morpheme: so that a standard computer and a transputer were two different kinds of puter. But as the transputer is now dead, that generalization must have died with it.
My girlfriend says puter to me and putie to her children.
< I often see "puter" written in cyber-space venues. >
I think Anna's on to something here. I always assumed puter was a chat room/bulletin board abbreviation from the early day of the web, back when most queries were of the "probs w/ DOS in new puter software." Hence the aforementioned "geek" usage...
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Glad to see you again...
