Tag: languages

Office Jargon

Let’s think out of the box: Really means, “Can you creatively anemic people please come up with something?” The person who says, “Let’s think out of the box” is usually desperate for a new idea and surrounded by people who are not known for generating ideas. So the phrase is actually an announcement that says, “I’m in trouble.” I need someone who can hit the ground running: Really means, “I am screwed.” Because no one can hit the ground running. You need to at least assess what race you’re in and who else is running. Do you have the bandwidth? Note that bandwidth is not time. It is something else. If you ask someone “Do you have time?” you mean, “Am I a priority?” If you ask someone “Do you have bandwidth” you mean, “You seem like your brain is fried. Can you pull yourself together to do this for me?”

the talk of a dysfunctional organization. see also research into the evasiveness of business english. strong words like “truth” are rarely used, the study finds.

Too much Bayes?

it is quite likely that a frequently misspelled word eventually occurs so much in the wild that it is considered a valid word. Maybe Google needs some if statements in their code after all, instead of blindly trusting the popularity contest that is Bayesian analysis.

more like accelerated language development. once a spelling becomes popular, it is the new correct spelling by sheer gravitational pull. go forth and coin those terms 🙂

Uncensor the Internet

There’s an article on-line from Money Magazine called “50 Bulls**t Jobs.” That’s right. Bulls**t. With those 2 asterisks in there. Come on. We know what word they mean. So why not just say it? If they think we’re adult enough to be reminded of the word, why don’t they think we’re adult enough to see the actual word?

see all the foul language that people are pretending they don’t use.

The oldest story ever written

There’s no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3 ka ago. 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840.

David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.

Scientific language

When talking amongst ourselves we should also be more careful what words we use. Otherwise we might slip when talking to the public, and say we believe something when we mean something quite different from the everyday usage of the term — and the trouble begins. If scientific belief is set against other beliefs, what differentiates it from them — are we not then just arguing matters of faith?

no more “we believe” and other words that confuse the unwashed

Waffle House cheat sheet

The photographs indicate the way in which a cook marks his orders. These secret plate markers allow a Waffle House cook to simultaneously prepare multiple customer orders at once. Let me give you an example. If I were to order 3 scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and hash browns, the waitress would face the grill and yell out loud – “Mark: Triple scrambled dry wheat plate.” The cook would then quickly take a large dinner plate, turn it sideways, and place a tub of jelly upside down at the 6 o’clock position. The 6 o’clock position indicates scrambled eggs, and the jelly upside down means wheat toast. I am not sure how to mark “dry” for the toast, or how to indicate hash browns versus grits.