I was serious; "bufferbloat" finds 27,000 results, a far cry from zero. I figured it was a spelling error.
Only upon seeing this comment did I check the results, which unfortunately do seem to (nearly) all point back to these articles. I'm unsure if the remaining ones (a fair amount can be found by adding "-gettys") refer to the same thing or not, but there are a few other mentions, especially if you add a space.
I think it is because Jim Gettys coined the term very recently. It seems likely that he is the very first person to discover this phenomenon.
Although there is a small chance that someone else also discovered it independently but came up with their own phrase to describe it -- a word that does not show up when you search for "bufferbloat".
The word "bufferbloat" is OK but it is not quite on target, imho. I don't have a better suggestion, but I think a better alternative is out there somewhere. Such a word would convey, not just the notion of bloatage, but also the notion of bits getting stuck in the comfortable expanse of modern, obese, buffers, fed at a rapid rate by modern hardware (and TCP stacks) on clean pipes.
Grasping at metaphors, I'm thinking of dampeners like bit potholes, quicksand, flypaper, speed bumps, bit tarpits...
"bit tarpit" has a nice ring to it. Or maybe "bithole". Though I'm now inescapably, desperately trying to come up with something legitimate that includes "tubes"...
