Christmas Magic & Unexpected Gifts

Humanity creates, shares, consumes and sometimes throws away up to 500 million terabytes of data every day. For the whole year 2025, it should be plus or minus 180 zettabytes, or 180 trillion bytes. The difference between the number 1 and a trillion is 21 zeros.

The limit of one zettabyte is said to have been crossed by internet traffic in 2016. In 2028, it could be 400 times as much. But it’s still growing, so who knows how wrong today’s predictions are. And when will we start counting in yottabytes after zettabytes.

Such reports of dizzying growth make us in the Šuplík editorial office giddy. And the question of whether we are not contributing more to it than is necessary. For example, by passionately collecting data ourselves in the form of letters (and vice versa?) and distributing it to the world after editing it. It’s our job. And our conscience.

We are relieved to learn that the global drift of data consists primarily of videos, and that Šuplíku’s creative group does not produce. You haven’t written about them yet, dear readers. We do cooperate with machine learning or artificial intelligence, but mostly independently of our will: so we have an alibi. We are old fashioned: when we say clouds, we see clouds first, not clouds of data.

Letters. Characters. Filling screens through keystrokes is only a fraction of the global digital bellows. But why shouldn’t we be restrained, frugal, sustainable in this respect as well? Couldn’t we – for starters – use a little less words? Just as taking care of the Earth starts with not throwing away a tissue in nature, we can also face data vertigo by not talking when we don’t have to.

We don’t mean that you have to search for all the wise silence quotes that the internet is full of. We wouldn’t understand that. And they consumed extra bytes.

Pleonasms are the main protagonist of our match. Wikipedia describes them as a stylistic device that occurs when redundant words of the same or similar meaning are used to express an idea. It is a common, even popular phenomenon. And for a small contribution of Czech language users to the talkativeness of modern man and his digital production.

A gift entered the hall of fame of pleonasms a long time ago for free or connection manually handy. Skill – we hear the word “hands” – is manual in itself, we can forgive the adverb. And we will save zero zero zero zettabytes.

Other tips for saving money: Magical magic (such as Christmas). Festive inauguration. (An inauguration without a ceremony would be a ritual on the level of punching an entry card into the barracks.) Unexpectedly surprise. Catastrophic apocalypse.

There are also more subtle and so far little-used opportunities for cuts. Come on foot. (Technically speaking, you can also come on stilts, although walking skills are necessary for this as well.) Content filling. (And what other is there?) Purposeful campaign. (All campaigns, from advertising to beets, are conducted for a purpose, a purposeless campaign is a contradiction and a unit of uselessness.) First discover. Fall down. Mutual interconnectedness. Private businessman.

No, we are not militantly opposed to pleonasms. In the interest of comprehensibility and smooth communication between customers of the gastro segment and the staff, we are willing to try and lemon lemonade.

What’s more, we recognize that pleonasms can have their quality, for example, as “a figure of speech created by the impressive accumulation of words”. But not everyone can write poems about blue blue sky as the romantic Mácha. Who, moreover, could afford it, did not know the data vertigo.

In addition, pleonasms are – controversially – part of the richness of the language, they belong to a long-term cultivated bond, therefore they must be cultivated with sensitivity.

What the train does not go through, or actually goes through, is the spelling pleonaZmus. Although it is officially correct and based on the volume of data, it is the same as pleonaSmus, but in reality it is an assassination of spelling taste along the lines of organism and orgasm. The threat of flooding the universe with chatter is against this insignificant lapalia. Cross out what doesn’t fit as usual!