I saw this on a website.
Problem:
The verb “denigrate” is inappropriate here.
Explanation:
The complete paragraph, which appeared on a page about broadband Internet service from Cricket Wireless, was “Throughput may be limited if use exceeds 5GB per month. Internet browsing does not include: hosted computer applications, continuous web camera or broadcast, automatic data feeds, machine-to-machine connections, peer to peer (P2P) connections or other applications that denigrate network capacity or functionality.”.
In other words, the writer was referring to software applications that could adversely affect the capacity or functionality of the Cricket Wireless broadband Internet network.
The verb “denigrate” means to derogatorily criticize, to defame, or to blacken. The N-I-G-R part of this verb can be traced to the Latin verb “nigrare”, which means to make black.
So “denigrate” applies to people, not to telecommunications or computer networks.
“Degrade” would be an appropriate verb to describe the act of adversely affecting network capacity or functionality.
For fun, I searched Google for “denigrate network” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 194 matches.
What I found the most interesting about those search results was that Verizon Wireless also had a page that included “denigrate network capacity or functionality” in a discussion about its broadband Internet service.
That leads to one of three conclusions:
- Cricket copied Verizon.
- Verizon copied Cricket.
- Cricket and Verizon copied a third party when writing terms and conditions for wireless broadband Internet service.
No matter which of these three statements is true, their misuse of “denigrate” left a digital trail.
Solution:
“… applications that degrade network capacity …”