Cory Doctrow of Boing Boing validates what I've been saying all along: using the phrase "Wi-Fi" to mean "wireless network access" is stupid:

30,000 or so people have written in to quibble over whether WiFi stands for wireless fidelity, pointing to the fact that the WiFi Consortium has decided to claim it does. It doesn't. WiFi is a pun, based on the contraction, "Hi-Fi," which stands for "High fidelity." WiFi "means" wireless fidelity the same way that "foo" and "bar" mean "f*cked up" and "beyond all recognition" -- e.g., not at all. WiFi is derived from high fidelity, but if WiFi *means* "wireless fidelity" then it means precisely nothing, because "wireless fidelity" is a nonsense phrase whose only meaning comes from the fact that you get a pun on "HiFi" when you shorten it.

"High Fidelity" is an old audio term describing the quality of the data; therefore, "Wireless Fidelity" should also describe the quality of the data, but it doesn't. "Wi-Fi" refers to the transmission medium; i.e., "wireless." His "foo" and "bar" example refers (1) to the military acronym FUBAR, meaning "f*ucked up beyond all recognition" and (2) to the way in which programmers show how variables are assigned in tutorials or lessons. In PHP, for example, a tutorial showing how a variable is assigned a value would show this

$foo="bar"

to mean that the variable $foo has the value "bar." (This is a standard programming tutorial just as the "Hello World!" tutorial is standard for Web markup [HTML, CSS] tutorials.)

It's a similar pun in that the words sound similar, but they don't mean the same thing.

Today, Cory posts something from Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance who presided over the selection of the name "Wi-Fi." Belanger suggests that the phrase Wi-Fi "is not an acronym. There is no meaning." Much like "SAT" no longer stands for anything (it used to stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test," then it stood for "Scholastic Assessment Test"; now, there is technically no acronym; it's just "SAT"), "Wi-Fi" is not short for "wireless fidelity."

I don't agree with this assessment. If you're going to have a word like "Wi-Fi," which is clearly designed to look like "Hi-Fi," then the phrases should be related somehow. Otherwise, you're diluting the meaning of the word "fidelity."

Then again, I've always been the Grammar Nazi.