brendan halpin

As a writer and a writing teacher, I’m interested in how language changes, and now I’m old enough to have witnessed it happening in real time. (Like how the “finta” of my youth became “finna”!)

And one thing that’s puzzled me is how “porno” became “porn.” Everybody used to say “porno”—see The Beastie Boys’ 1986 “Fight For Your Right to Party,” with its complaint that “your mom threw away your best porno mag,” or the band Perry Farrell started in 1992, Porno for Pyros.

The transition happened in the late oughts. I know this because I sold a novel, The Mall of Cthulhu, in like 2005 or 2006. In this version of the novel, Laura admonishes Ted not to look at “porno” on her computer. When I was doing final copy edits for the 2008 publication, I changed this to “porn” because “porno” sounded outdated and corny to me.

So I know more or less when the shift happened, but I’ve always wondered why. And yesterday, I finally came up with a theory. It involves our tongues and the internet!

So Netflix streaming started in 2007. Pornhub also launched in that year, which indicates the linguistic shift was already underway. (This is a kind of transitional time—Isabella Rossellini’s nature series “Green Porno” premiered in 2008, so both terms were clearly in use in 2007-2008) Both Netflix streaming and Pornhub were enabled by high-speed (at the time) internet, and, in turn, started to drive more widespread adoption of high-speed internet. And so DVDs started to whither, Blockbuster died in 2010-11, and porn consumption moved almost exclusively to the internet.

But what does this have to do with the missing “o”? Well, before high-speed internet, when people spoke of pornography, they typically talked about “porno mags,” as the Beastie Boys did, or “Porno movies.” Try to say either “porn mags” or “porn movies.” Notice how this is kind of tough to say—your tongue doesn’t want to go straight from the n sound to the m sound. But if you have a vowel in between the n and the m, the phrase becomes much easier to say! The o provides a nice little bridge!

But once pornography consumption started moving away from both magazines and movies, the o was no longer necessary because no one was pairing the term with “mags” or “movies” anymore.

And here we are 15 years later, and nobody says “porno” anymore. I don’t have any large point to make here—I was just happy to come up with a theory for why our language changed in this way!