I read an article in the Prague Daily Monitor this week that was overflowing with the word server. There would be nothing wrong with that had the article been about servers, or at least one server. But the article wasn’t about servers. It was about a website. Here are a few excerpts from the text:
“Many mistakes on server promoting Czech Republic”
“The newly-launched internet server www.czech.cz, aimed to promote the Czech Republic…”
“The server is mainly designed for foreign tourists…”
I’d probably leave the article alone had it not become the proverbial last straw. For some reason, Czechs seem to have a particular liking for using the word server when referring to a website, so I read or hear about a server www this or www that or about someone “running a server about something” a lot more often than I’d like to. And now this article comes along…
To rtj/dr with the Prague Daily Monitor and to everyone who doesn’t know what a server is: A server (in Czech server) is a computer that sits in a room somewhere with a bunch of connectors and cables coming out of it. It’s a machine. It doesn’t promote anything, it can’t be launched unless it’s shot into space on a space shuttle, and it’s usually not designed for foreign tourists. The term you want to use is website (in Czech internetové/webové stránky), i.e. an online collection of pages with content.
Definitions of both terms can be found in dictionaries and encyclopedias all over the internet. Such as on that handy server called Wikipedia.
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