One of the morning radio teams in these parts has a weekly feature called “The List of Things That Must Go,” in which either they or listeners who write in (they alternate every other week) bitch about their pet peeves, i.e., things that must go. Today, someone went off on a lovely little rant about the recent trend toward referring to the Internet as “the cloud.” It’s not a cloud, this person insisted, it’s a physical thing composed of wires and servers and technology, and it already has a perfectly good name, the Internet, so why are people now calling it by this vague and pretentious buzzword?

Normally I’d be all kinds of down with this gripe, being as I am generally opposed to buzzwords and jargon in all their forms. But this morning I found myself listening with a bemused grin, thinking to myself that this person obviously doesn’t realize this term originated with the graphical depiction of the Internet as a cloud on networking diagrams. Because that was the simplest way to show a complex yet amorphous infrastructure that usually doesn’t need to be represented in any kind of detail on these types of diagrams. It’s not a marketing thing at all, or at least not entirely… it actually has some legitimacy!

God, I have got to get away from the tech industry somehow. I have no business knowing things like that.