The Etymology of "Y2K"
Y2K was born on Monday, June 12, 1995, at 11:31 p.m. It was delivered in the
middle of an otherwise unintelligible e-mail, a contribution to an Internet
discussion group of computer geeks exploring the millennium bug long before
most people were surfing the World Wide Web.
The efficiency of the term is undeniable--"Y" for "year," the number "2,"
and "K" for "thousand" (from the Greek "kilo")--and it eventually caught on.
But its creator remained unidentified until just over a year ago, when someone
performed the equivalent of a computer paternity test by searching the
discussion group's archives for the term's first use.
The father of the phrase is a 52-year-old Massachusetts programmer named
David Eddy, who's now the president of a Y2K consulting business (click
here to visit his Web page). "People were calling it Year 2000,
CDC [Century Date Change], Faddle [Faulty Date Logic]," Eddy says. "There were
other contenders. [Y2K] just came off my fingertips."
But what made Y2K flourish while its siblings withered? Chatterbox put in a
call to S.B. Master, who runs a naming company called Master-McNeil (great
name!). Master, who has helped name products for clients including Sun
Microsystems and 3Com, performed her own "linguistic analysis" of Y2K and
promptly listed six reasons why the term holds such appeal.
For starters, she said, Y2K is efficient, since it uses just three
characters; similarly structured acronyms such as IBM, NBC, and GTE are a
staple these days. Second, it's gratifyingly symmetrical, with the two
consonants hugging that number in the middle. Third, the whole tradition of
combining letters and numbers is a venerated techie convention (think R2D2 and
C3P0). The date-glitch issue has obvious technical associations; thus there is
a strong connection between the term's appearance and its meaning.
But none of that explains why we're not using, say, Y2M--which simply
replaces the consonant representing the Greek term for thousand with the one
for "mille," its Latin counterpart. Y2K, Masters pointed out, is rhythmically
superior. When Y2K is analyzed as poetry, one sees a satisfying alternation of
long and short syllables: a diphthong (Y), followed by a monothong (2), and a
final, concluding diphthong (K). By contrast, Y2M ends with a redundant
monothong. Masters praised Y2K for its superior sound production, noting that
the term features an elegant plosive progression, moving from soft (Y) to hard
(2) to hardest (K). Y2M retreats lamely with a soft "M."
Finally, Masters lauded the term for the way its articulation produces a
satisfying movement to the inside of the mouth. The term begins with a labial
sound: the "Y" being formed with the lips. The "2" is alveolar; it is produced
at the middle of the mouth when the tongue touches the roof. Finally, the "K"
is velar, forming in the back of the mouth. That progression sets Y2K far apart
from its competition. In fact, Masters said, she could think of only one other
word that featured such an exquisitely pleasing articulatory progression in the
mouth: "Monica."
