I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs Would you mind leveraging a time unit while I ideate my ecosystem? Sorry, I meant to say “Give me a minute while I sort my things out” but I’ve been writing a lot about disruptive technology this week. I must have zoned while dogfooding my hume-code for bugs… er, I mean “got carried away while proofreading my articles for …
@Rameses Niblick etc (lovely moniker, btw!) - no. Squirrels are called squiggles, because when they move fast they run in a squiggly kinda way, squiggle, squiggle, squiggle.... (says my inner 7-year old)
SQL is pronounced sequel by folk who are trying to get the job done and haven't got all day to worry about what some twonk thinks about how it should be pronounced.
GIF is pronounced with a g-sound identical to that in the word graphics, because that's where the g in it comes from. See previous reference to not caring about twonks with too much time on their hands.
I'm loving the change from being a helldesker to being a hort (note that T on the end!) which is what horticultural students are called - I no longer GIF a fsck how folk pronounce SQL. It's fun leveraging the synchronicties of object-oriented living! And who'da thunk my left boot makes a decent de-bugging tool? Hort's kinda like open source, too, as the answer to a lot of things seems to be to fork it!
Icon because I'm enjoying a nice glass of the college's very own sweet cider. First time I've really enjoyed using the products created where I work!
Or Woody from Woodpecker...
Hmmm.. Cider[1]...
[1] For those not fortunate to live in the UK, Woodpecker Cider was a fixture of my youth. Not use whether it still exists.. But there are plenty of really, really good ciders around so I've not missed it.
As someone fortunate to have lived the first half of his life in the UK before escaping to somewhere even worse I was most disappointed to find that in the USA cider is just apple juice! They don't even make it with a dead rat in the barrel!
Conversely, Americans visiting the UK and seeing the vast range of ciders on offer are in for a surprise.
Yeah, you're a victim of language shift (a native French speaker here was similarly surprised). Although apple cider (U.S. version) in no way can be confused with apple juice, if you want the alcoholic variety, you ask for "hard cider".
Woodpecker was widely available (well, when hard cider was just taking off again1 here) a couple of decades ago, but the Big BrewCos have been doing what they do best -- dumping flavored water-alcohol mixtures on the market -- so finding actual hard ciders that taste of apple takes a bit of research.
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1. Some sales idiots tried marketing it to bars as "cider beer", which then became the term the wait staff used with customers. That usage got slammed pretty hard by customers who actually knew what the stuff was.
""I don’t know whether what you think you’re writing is supposed to mean" - Was this intended to mean something?"
Maybe? It's not inconceivable that it's a play on "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" from The Princess Bride. (which you must see if you haven't yet)
"Being able to make up new jargon whenever you like is one of the finest unique features of the English language."
My distant memory of a year of Science German in the 6th form says that not only can German do this but it can do it with twice as many letters and probably more with a bit of effort.
"My distant memory of a year of Science German in the 6th form says that not only can German do this "
Wasserstoffionenkonzentrationbestimmunggeraet. (pH meter)
But in the same language a mobile phone is a handy. Presumably using one is a hand job.
The French, of course, had a proper committee to organise technical terms (I don't know if they still do, but I was once sat at a dinner with a member of said committee). Hence caméscope, logiciel and so on. But also navigateur being a browser (wonder why) while the similar job function of pilote is actually a driver.
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I just wrote at work:
"Oracledatenbankclientinstallationdateisystemspeicherumfang".
And the term "handy" for a mobile as it used in Germany was coined by the Saxons: when the Berlin Wall fell, most of them saw a mobile for the first time which they recognized as phone but were missing the phone cable.
So they asked: "Häm die kein Schnur?"
cklammer,
When you said the term handy was coined by the Saxons - you created a very strange mental picture in my head. I didn't think the people of the Saxony, my brain supplied the mental image of Saxons. Since I've visited Sutton Hoo, that was a bloke in really impressive armour with a bloody big war axe on a 6 foot shaft and a nice sword. Complete with shield and a boat full of shiny things to take to the afterlife.
I don't remember the section of the museum dedicated to his Nokia 3310 - but I imagine that's just because the government hushed it up. Being a 3310 they were able to turn it on, and it still had 2 bars of battery left, which is how they could look up his contacts and find out he was called Redwulf.
"The French, of course, had a proper committee to organise technical terms [...]"
Fun fact: so does the Vatican.
There is a Latin term for all the modern stuff around us. Poke around a bit, it's fun. Plus, you find a lot of fancy words for mundane stuff that you can use in presentations, reports, job descriptions, job titles on business cards... And as Latin is an officially recognized language in the EU, at least there no one can fault you for using it.
not only can German do this but it can do it with twice as many letters
German is an agglutinative language - it contructs words by gluing lots of smaller words together (like Forth - except, unlike Forth, you are expected to see and say all the parts).
English kind of does that too (there is, after all, a sort-of-Germanic language buried under all the layers of languages that we've stolen from elsewhere). Hence - database is a base that contains data. We tend to stop after a certain number of syllables, but German seems to prefer long words.
"We tend to stop after a certain number of syllables, but German seems to prefer long words."
I'm not sure that we do (stop). We tend to write the resulting mess as separate words but that's a cosmetic detail. The big exception here is when we are glueing Latin or Greek roots together, in which case we join them up, presumably because the parts aren't recognisable words on their own.
Either way, in the spoken language the stream of sounds is much the same. I imagine that in the mind of a listener these compounds are just as separable (or not) in either language.
I can't really disagree with anything you're saying here. Possibly the only worse documentation is that which comes poorly translated from India. But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits created ITIL, apparently as a punishment and loathing for all IT workers everywhere.
"But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits"
No, no, no!
Don't start a sentence with "But".
Don't use "us" when you should have used "we".
Oh, an please spell "defence" correctly.
"All I can say in defence of we Yanks is that the Brits must have created ITIL..."
Actually, "But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits" is clunky but correct, and "All I can say in defence of we Yanks is..." is incorrect. What the OP should have said is, "But all I can say in our defense" for better flow, but grammatically his use of "us" is correct.
Grammar rules found here: http://snarkygrammarguide.blogspot.com/2012/09/object-of-preposition-all-of-us.html
For me, the easy way to tell is to remove the noun from the prepositional phrase and see how it reads.
Ex: He has no trust in us scientists.
Correct (with "scientists" removed): He has no trust in us.
Incorrect (replace with "we" and also with "scientists" removed): He has no trust in we.
So if the sentence sounds correct with the noun removed, you have the correct pronoun.
The gym I used to go to had "How does it feel in my arms" playing every half hour. It started with arms, then the chorus had the line twice with a little delay so the s of one arms came right after the ar of the other. By the end of the song the lyrics become completely blatant but apparently no-one else heard them the way I did.
I leave you with my favorite jarjon acronym: People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.
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The consonants for the name of god transliterate to YHVH, but the wrong vowel points were added to avoid saying the name out loud by accident. Jehovah's witnesses use those wrong vowel points (and get the first consonant wrong). If we start calling them Yahweh's Auditors will the get the message?
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