Create + Update = ?

In the world of databases, you can perform what are generally (and amusingly) referred to as CRUD operations -- create, read, update, and delete. Every editor I personally know who's encountered the term CRUD has been moved to ask "Seriously, can we even use this term?" Indeed, we can and, since our audience uses it, we should.

Fun as that is, I'm actually interested today in a term I have run across a few times recently that pertains to just two of these, namely create and update. The standard database command for creating a new database entry is Insert. If you need to update an existing entry, you use (logically) the Update command. Sometimes, tho, you have a situation where you want to update-or-insert — that is, update the item if it exists, or create (insert) it if it doesn't.

Turns out there's actually a term for this: Upsert. Like, a legitimate, definitely-in-use term that gets over 100,000 search hits and that has its own Wikipedia entry.

Like CRUD, this isn't apt to warm the hearts of editors. (It's also not yet in general dictionaries, which is more editorial reason to frown about it.) It's handy, tho, at least for the crowd that deals with CRUD-y stuff all day long. The term has been formalized in at least a few programming frameworks as an actual command (salesforce.com, Oracle). It's hard to imagine that the terms would escape into general usage from its current confines in the world of database folks. But you never know.

I can C you now

Had one of those moments. Yesterday evening my wife was looking at the cover of one of her nursing magazines, which had an article titled "Nurses in the C-Suite." "What does that mean?", she asked me. My articulate reply: "Huh?"

Then today I was glancing at someone's resume, which said this: "Highly effective external and internal communication from C-level to consumer." Same term, basically, twice within 24 hours. What the heck?

Apparently I've been out of touch with the terms C-suite and C-level. It's all over Google (> 1 million) hits, as if the evidence of seeing it on the cover of a magazine weren't enough evidence that it's widely known. Wikipedia has a nice explanation in its entry for Corporate title:

The highest level executives are usually called "C-level" or part of the "C-suite", referring to the 3-letter initials starting with "C" and ending with "O" (for "Chief __________ Officer"); the traditional offices are Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Operations Officer (COO), and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Chief administrative officer and Chief risk officer positions are often found in banking, insurance, and other financial services companies. Technology companies (including telecom and semi-conductor) tend to have a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), while companies with a strong Information Technology (IT) presence have a Chief Information Officer (CIO). In creative/design companies (such as film studios, a comics company or a web design company), there is sometimes a Chief Creative Officer (CCO), responsible for keeping the overall look and feel of different products, otherwise headed by different teams, constant throughout a brand.

I take a very small comfort that the terms C-level and C-office don't appear (yet) in general-purpose dictionaries (including the OED, as far as I can tell). The Investopedia site has a definition that refers to C-suite as "widely used slang." That seems right.

I'm curious how long the terms have been around; they seem widespread enough to seem pretty established. Paul McFedries finds a citation from 1997 for CxO (Chief [Whatever] Officer), and his entry (tho not the citation) talks about C-suite and C-level.

I tried a Google n-gram search, but the hyphen is treated as a token by itself and I don't know how to get around that just yet.

Anyway, there you go: one of those moments. A term (two terms) that I've apparently been surrounded by for a decade or more and would have sworn I'd never heard before. I suppose it's evidence that I my own self will not soon be achieving any sort of C-level.

Why a Duck?

Back in July, a section of [the] 405 in Los Angeles was closed for repair. The anticipation of the traffic mess that this was going to make spawned the term carmageddon. (In the end, that whole project went pretty smoothly, possibly due to the extreme publicity and people's efforts to "use alternate routes.")

In Seattle, the venerable Alaskan Way Viaduct that runs along the downtown waterfront — a stretch of State Route 99 — has been shut down. This is the first phase of a project in which the old viaduct will be replaced with a tunnel. The viaduct is old (1953) and was damaged during a 2001 earthquake. Everyone feared a repeat of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in San Francisco, and the state DOT (cleverly?) posted a video that showed a simulation of what might happen to the viaduct in an earthquake.

All this led to a, um, Seattle-style debate about how to replace it, and here we are, a decade later, finally getting around to actually doing something. As of Friday October 21, the viaduct will be shut for 10 days while they do some preliminary work.


The problem is that the viaduct carries about 100,000 cars a day and that the only other major north-south route in Seattle is I-5. Closing off this route is, as with the L.A. closure of I-405, many people's worst traffic nightmare.

Ok! So what to call it? Carmageddon is sort of already claimed.

An early term that the MSM seems to favor is Viaduct Crunch. Adequate, but lacking that certain something.

Let's see what's shaking on Twitter! One hashtag on Twitter that has some traction is #viacondios. Cute, but to my mind a bit of a stretch.

It's looking like people are converging around #viadoom. It's all over Twitter, of course, and the term has gotten enough traction that it's showing up (albeit in quotation marks) in media reports — for example, in a Reuters article.

I do suspect that cute names for this little diversion are going to wear thin very quickly. L.A.'s carmageddon lasted one weekend. Viadoom is going to last 10 days, and there's years' worth of construction still to come. Perhaps when the tunnel boring starts in earnest, we'll get another term for that particular mess.

PS Should you not recognize the title of this entry, have a gander at this video.

Just throw some text at it

We've mused here before about the interesting "up" particle that can be added to so many verbs (man up, whip up, bulk up, eat it up, new up).* In Dilbert today, another appearance of the interesting "up":

This usage is not, I believe, the "up of completeness" -- eat up, drink it up. Rather, it's the "up" of "conjure [up]" -- whip (something) up, maybe even draw (a contract) up and make (something) up (?). There are subtle gradations of meaning here that might or might not all be the same.

Anyway, I like this a lot. Perhaps because there's been more than one time when I was indeed called upon to "word something up."

* And not just here; see also Fritinancy.

"Hello, World"

Over on my main blog, I have a piece on how Dennis Ritchie's influential book The C Programming Language introduced the phrase "Hello, World" to represent the starting point for pretty much any learning experience. Check it out:

Dennis Ritchie, Technical Writer

Let's (cohort) party down

A friend of mine recently sent me email in which he said he'd been standing in an elevator with some young people who were talking about a "cohort party" and did I know what that was? Not me. To my surprise, searching around revealed many uses of cohort in casual ways that suggested people were familiar with the term:

• If anyone is interested in having a cohort party, feel free to suggest some possible ideas. […] On friday, Melanie was saying something about a get together on December 15th, which is the day after we finish our practicum [#]
  
  
• Some girls from my Elementary Education cohort decided to have a couples party. [#]
  
  
• Each intake is split into cohorts. Each cohort divides into clusters. And each cluster… well, it’s just a cluster. So a lot of socialising happens at the cohort level. Like last night at the Irish pub in Rittenhouse Square, where the INSEAD group crashed a two-cohort party. We were told to ask the cohort of whomever we spoke to before they had a chance to ask ours. If they said “cohort E”, we were to pretend to be from “cohort I”. If they said “cohort I”, we were naturally from “cohort E” [#]
  
  
• We have had the chance to meet many members of Cohort 10 as they’ve joined us for classes and speaker series over the past few months […] Now we are all anxiously awaiting the Baltimore Study Group-sponsored cohort party in January. [#]

And so on. But no actual definitions, as in "a cohort party is ...," really sprang out. My kids are college age and not un-hip; when I queried them, my son did note that he understood the term cohort in its, what, sociological sense: "a group of people having approximately the same age." But the term cohort party rang no bells with him.

I have to conclude two things. Thing one: I'm an old guy and the term cohort seems sort of quasi-technical to me (when I hear it, I think "academic paper"), but for younger people, it's a normal word that they're used to hearing in descriptions of their class/group/work unit. I asked Ben Zimmer about this whole thing, and he noted that he only started hearing cohort when he got to grad school, where it was used to describe what I might have termed his "graduating class." An n-gram for cohort provides a bit of evidence that use of the term has been rising since about 1970 or so:

Thing two is that a cohort party is nothing more than a party that your cohort -- your school class, whatever -- is throwing. And the reason that this seems strange to us oldsters is that cohort is just not a term we were brought up with.

If anyone knows something more specific than this, I'd sure love to hear it.

A smarter way to app

The Windows Phone people are rolling out a new version of the operating system, known officially as Windows Phone 7.5, known unofficially by its code name "Mango." The tagline (or one of them, anyway) seems to be "A smarter way to app":

(Click here to see a 30-second video.)

The meaning they intend seems to be "a smarter way to use apps" as opposed to, say, "a smarter way to create apps." (Which would be a meaning that might have some traction in the group I work in.) Or I suppose you could interpret it as "a smarter way for us (Phone) to present apps to you (user)."

Certainly app has been established as a noun, and there was the interesting tussle earlier in 2011 when Apple sued Amazon over the trademark "App Store."

But I haven't till now seen app being used as a verb. Of course, this is marketing, and those folks are nothing if not playful with grammar.

One Nissan Leaf, two Nissan ...

Now it's not just the Prius and its tricky plural. Nissan's electric car is the Leaf. Suppose you had two of them. They'd be ... Leaves? Leafs? June Casagrande thinks Leafs. So do I, and for the reason she mentions. (See my thots about the Prius.) You?

The honey badgers of web development

First there was the honey badger, a badger-like creature that's apparently known for its "ferocious defensive abilities." Then there was a nature program (video) that explored the honey badger's appetite for such delicacies as bee larvae and cobras and its apparent indifference to bees and snakebite and venom and pain. And then there
was Randall's alternate narration (video) for that nature documentary, from which all the world learned that "Honey badger don't care. Honey badger don't give a shit."

Like it? Get the t-shirt or the poster.

Right, this isn't news; the Know Your Meme site has a nice piece that recounts the brief history. (It also came up in the TV show "Glee," which is nothing if not culturally au courant.)

What's fun is watching the term honey badger go generic. Earlier this year, Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl) tweeted this:

Honey badger don't care about "i.e." and "e.g." (http://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg), but you should: http://j.mp/m3apUD

That was in May; note that she uses the full phrase and includes a link for the as-then-still uninitiated. But yesterday I found this in a technical article:

Then there are the honey badgers of web development, the notorious Content Management Systems, designed to kill all your hopes and dreams.

No "don't care" here; no link. You either get it or don't.[1]

This is what really interests me; is it possible for the term honey badger to become decoupled from any explicit reference to Randall's video and enter the lexicon as a synonym for, dunno, "indifference" ("aggressive indifference"?). That would be pretty awesome for Randall, and awesome to have seen it happen.


1 As an aside, from an editorial perspective, the article is filled with cultural references and is too clever by half, as people say. Woe onto the non-English-as-first-language speaker (non-American?) who reads this. Entertaining, tho. :-)

Organize and humorize

A little tongue-in-cheek (mostly) humorization from The New Yorker:



I say "mostly" because although they used a hyphen in the body of the ad, they don't in the subject line of the email where I saw this.

Update: This is an ad for a desk calendar, in case that isn't clear, oops.

I personally have no problem with -izing nouns, but some folks do ("seemingly lazy application of this custom").

True only if you don't say it about yourself

It's always bugged me, too, this thing where a person or a company takes pains to tell you what they think their virtues are:

• I'm a classy person.
• I'm an educated person.
• I'm a modest person.
• (Most any reference to "elegant" in a product description.)
• etc.

Now John Scalzi has coined a term for this: McKean's inversion. He describes it this way:

The adjective a person says they are is frequently the thing they are not.

The name McKean's inversion originates via an indirect route. Erin McKean is a lexicographer (among her other talents) who once stated what's come to be known as McKean's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error." Scalzi knows McKean and says he remembers how she once observed that ...

... if someone used the word to describe themselves, it was often quite obvious that they were in fact the opposite.

Thus the inversion. And as noted, McKean's Law was already taken.

It's a little early to tell, but my sense is that this is intended to be used for instances where the person is being a bit clueless. It would therefore not work when they're simply being disingenuous, e.g., "I'm just a humble technical writer." But who knows?

One media to rule them all

Not a surprising neologism in retrospect, but then again, good ones always seem obvious after the fact:

• Welcome to the first murdochracy
• This is What Murdochracy Looks Like
• The revolt against Murdochracy: a view from Oz
• End days for dead paper and "Murdochracy"?
• Is the Murdochracy tumbling down?

... etc., about 23K hits in all on teh Google. The term seems to be a particular favorite of John Pilger.

Definition? Well, dunno, something like this:

Murdoch's immense political power , which has had successive Prime Ministers dancing attendance on him, and rushing to confer lucrative favors on his News Corporation.

(Thanks to James Galasyn for finding this one.)

Legitimate illegitimists?

It's not often you get to watch a new word being launched, but we might have one here. On Slate yesterday, Anne Applebaum gave it a shot:

In contemporary America, we also have people who are — and I am inventing this word here — illegitimists: They believe that the president of the United States is illegitimately elected, or that the country is ruled by a cabal that is in turn controlled by some other sinister force or forces.

(She is careful to note that her intent is to be agnostic with respect to political persuasion, by noting that this also described Marxists in an earlier era. Not everyone buys this attempt.)

Just as a word, illegitimist is not unknown. It has no dictionary entry in standard dictionaries (at least, as per Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com). Even the mighty OED does not have a specific entry for this term. However, there is a precedent or two:

• In Treitschke's History of Germany in the Nineteeth Century, we find "... must play the magnanimous protector of the illegitimist Isabella."
• J. E. P. Boulden has a play named Medicine; or, the legitimists and the illegitimists.

But these are slightly different meanings, I deduce; these refer to people who are illegitimate, as opposed to people who question the legitimacy of something.

This seems like a handy term to me. It covers more ground than various specific manifestations of illegitimism (birthers are her poster child). It gets at a kind of core belief system that's independent of the specifics of why the illegitimist thinks the government is illegitimate, and even which government (or other authority) is being thusly considered.

One could imagine the term being used outside a political context, I suppose. You might use some term and point at the American Heritage Dictionary as your authority, and I could be an illegitimist about that authority. Or we could use the term to debate someone's religious beliefs and the sources thereof; or, if the term really dug in, we could use it to refer to anyone who questions any claim made by an appeal to authority. That seems unlikely, but you never know. Still, the term has to start somewhere. Let's see how it goes.

PepsiCo and the future of snack terms

The May 16, 2011 edition of The New Yorker has a fascinating article ("Snacks for a Fat Planet," paywall) about the PepsiCo's efforts to try to divine their future markets. It's also fascinating for an unusual number of neological-type terms and for the not-entirely-clear formula they're using to determine whether to put presumably unfamiliar terms inside quotation marks.

The two terms that struck me first were drinkified (for foods) and snackified (for drinks). Here's a cite that sums it up:

Let's say you give a kid a carrot," Nooyi [CEO] explained. "And he says, 'I don't want to eat a carrot.' But you say, 'I tell you what, I'll give it to you in a wonderful drinkable form that's still as close to the carrot as possible.' All of a sudden, what have I done? I've drinkified the snack! Or I take a fruit juice and give it to you in a wonderful squeezable form, which is Tropolis. What have I done now? I've snackified the drink.

There are ~9000 hits on Google for drinkified; many of them reference this same thing (either the article or similar stories about PepsiCo).

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and muse that these two terms are going to irritate a lot of people.

As I say, there were some other terms in the article as well. One is, I think, of Pepsi origin, others are from other fields, but relatively unfamiliar. Let's say that there are a lot of quotation marks in the article around terms. Here's my list:

• reward sensitivity -- a term from psychology (?) referring to how easily people are satisfied. (Something that people who design snacks take into account.) No quotation marks in the article. (34K Google hits.)
• bliss point -- the point at which you achieve satisfaction, same context. In quotation marks. (48K Google hits.)
• sip and spit, e.g. sip and spit rooms -- the technique used for tasting. In quotation marks. (Familiar from wine and coffee tasting, I suppose -- 160K Google hits.)
• blue-can Pepsi -- the traditional/original version of Pepsi. No quotation marks. (8K Google hits.)

Not all new terms, but new enough, I guess, that John Seabrook (or some editor) decided that some -- but not all -- needed to be marked.

From Greek battles to all-day presentations

One of the VPs where I work is a guy named Scott Guthrie, who's one of those people who seems to be able to pack about 48 hours into a day. In addition to VP-ing, whatever that exactly consists of, he flies around the world giving presentations -- often keynote speeches -- to large and enthusiastic audiences of programmers.

A diversion. At Microsoft (and, I imagine, many other places), the basic algorithm that they use to assign you an email name is first name + last initial. For example, an email alias that's well know at Microsoft is billg. However, if you've got a common name (like Mike, for example), they have to do something else. One possibility is to start adding letters to the last name. As a result, Scott Guthrie's email address is scottgu. Partly because we seem to have so many Scotts in our division, this has led to VP Guthrie being referred to as "Gu" or even "the Gu" (pronounced "goo," of course). Example: "We're meeting tomorrow with the Gu about this."*

And now to wrench the discussion to a new track. Once upon a time there was a battle near the Greek city named Marathon, and a dude named Pheidippides started a trend by supposedly running some insane distance to announce an Athenian victory. (And this before Gatorade.) Now a marathon is a really long race, or by extension, "any contest, event, or the like, of great, or greater than normal, length or duration or requiring exceptional endurance." Example: dance marathon, sales marathon.

But why use a full name like dance marathon when you can use, so to speak, first name + last bit? The -athon suffix is very productive. Here's just a few of the many, many examples I found:

• Walkathon (alt. walk-a-thon)
• Bike-a-thon
• Science-athon
• Organize-athon
• Stay-awake-a-thon
• Butt-numb-a-thon (my personal favorite), described as "a celebration of film fandom," 12 movies in a row.

Almost all the usages I've found use a hyphen to mark either -athon or -a-thon. (The latter spelling suggests that -thon could by itself be the suffix, but I haven't found an example.) The exception is walkathon, which might have become sufficiently established to be thought of as a single word rather than a conscious construction, dunno.

Back to the Gu. I'm not sure how many people use "Gu" as a vocative in Scott's presence, but he's well aware of it. So much so, in fact, that Scott decided to refer to the occasional all-day presentation that he gives as a Guathon. We hope, of course, that this refers only to the "greater than normal length or duration" of the event and not to it "requiring exceptional endurance." :-)

* There is, I'm sure, a study somewhere that examines the phenomenon of referring to people in the third person by their email aliases -- at Microsoft, the once-feared "BillG review" has, AFAIK, no other name.

It's useless, but somehow not

Twitter. Even ardent supporters admit that if you describe Twitter in simple terms ("you post whatever pops into your head, many times a day!"), it does seem lame. Someone once called it "the stupidest application you’re ever going to see."

Yet this was someone who thought it was great. Fans have a hard time describing to the unconvinced why Twitter is so great. Scott Hanselman -- prolific blogger, early adopter, and unabashed supporter -- came up with a term that seems to capture this combination of banality and utility in his blog post Twitter: The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging. In fact, Hanselman goes one better in a subsequent post -- he calls Twitter a river of uselessfulness, and a river (indeed, torrent) it is.

It's an amusing neologism, what with its oxymoronic melding and clever way of both anticipating and retorting to the common criticism of Twitter.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is not the only citation. I found one instance from a time before Scott's blog post, and meaning roughly the same thing (I think), but in a very different context. This is from a forum post that pertains to pickup trucks:

Nothing fancy and of debatable uselessfullness (probably should never be in 4Hi with lockers ON). Maybe some cases in sand dunes or snow, but not much else.

Or perhaps this is just a bit of a mistake. Note that the author here includes "debatable," which I think is unnecessary if you stick to your guns with the new term.

I did find another instance, more recent, but this one is clearly intended with a different meaning.

Uselessfulness. Yes that is now a word. A term we are coining for Tuscon artist Nick Georgiou who takes useless trash (pretty much anything print) and creates amazing useful works of art.

And one more, which came up in the context of a programming blog, a post titled Shuffle: an extension method of random uselessfulness. In this case, the author simply uses the word with no real additional context. I believe the implication is that he's presenting a programming technique that is of perhaps no real use, but it's actually not that clear to me why he's using the term or what he means by it.

I know Scott a little bit, enough to ask him about this term. He confirms that he invented the term for his original blog post. I'm guessing that these other instances are probably independent inventions, or in the last case (the programming blog), maybe it's one of Scott's readers taking up the term and propagating it.

A fun exercise would be to think of new places to wield this term. The concept certainly isn't strange, so there should be lots of candidates. :-)

Truthiness and falsiness

Stephen Colbert put the term truthiness on the map (pdf), but there is a context where the terms truthy and falsy have another, quite precise meaning. This is among people who use the programming language known as JavaScript, which runs in web browsers. The following explanation, by Mike Davies, appears on the isolani blog:

JavaScript has keywords for true and false, but like many C-style derivative languages, it has concepts of truthy and falsy. These are non-boolean expressions that can be treated as a boolean value. The number zero is falsy, and any other number is truthy. Equally for strings, an empty string is falsy, and a non-empty string is truthy.

A slight variation from another blog:

When javascript is expecting a boolean and it’s given something else, it decides whether the something else is "truthy" or "falsy". An empty string (''), the number 0, null, NaN, a boolean FALSE, and undefined variables are all "falsy". Everything else is “truthy”.

(NaN here refers to a value known as "not a number", which JavaScript returns when it needs a number but gets something else, like if you try to add 12 + "a". A discussion for another time: does boolean get a cap?)

I'm not finding a lot of references to these terms outside JavaScript. One blogger uses the terms when referring to the Clojure programming language, and I found a couple of references to falsy in some text about the language Python. Contrary to what the first cite suggests, truthy and falsy are not, at least as far as I can tell, used in descriptions of the C language or its close cousins C++ or Java.

Truthy does have a dictionary definition, which is listed as "Truthful; likely; probable." It seems to me that the JavaScript definition does not match this; in JavaScript we're not talking about likelihood or probability, just a collection of values that all are treated the same (i.e., as true).

I don't have a smartphone, I have ...

Those of us who haven't quite gotten with the smartphone wave are stuck using, you know, older cellphones. While everyone we know goes on at tedious length about their iPhone or Android or Windows 7 phone and all the many apps that they play with, we have ... that other kind of cellphone. What kind is that, exactly? Not a dumbphone, except in jest. (Or exasperation.) Do you know?

There is a formal term, actually: it's a feature phone. (2.6 MM hits on Google.)

There are some interesting things here. One is that this is a kind of retronym; the term feature phone is defined primarily by what it's not. What it's not, however, has changed a bit. If Wikipedia is to be believed, a feature phone was originally a phone that had more features than the original set of monochrome, just-talk cellphones. (Cite.) However, these days, since those old-skool phones are pretty much gone, a feature phone is a phone that has fewer features than its successor, namely a smartphone. Or both at once -- this article describes it this way:

Feature phones, [which] are dumb phones that have elements (but not the full connectivity) of smartphones.

And here's another wrinkle: the term smartphone itself has had something of a movable definition. Or even a circular one. Here's Wikipedia:

A smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone.

The article goes on to describe the first smartphone (1992) as having many of the features that people would probably consider smartphone-ish:

[...] it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, notepad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard. By today's standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking for example the camera now considered usual.

1992? Impressive.

Note that this implicitly says that smartphones today include cameras, i.e., part of the definition (necessary but not sufficient) is that there's a camera. It don't do the trick if it ain't got that click.

But the term smartphone itself is even older than that. Paul McFedries finds a cite that goes back to 1984, where of course it meant something a bit different:

Part of the transparent keyboard facility is the ability to deal with the telephone through the "smartphone" option, which makes it possible to answer the phone (using a headset) with the computer.

Not today's definition, I think we can agree. It's tempting to say that smartphone simply means "whatever the newest state of phone technology is," but that isn't supported by actual usage citations. Still, it does lead a body to speculate what we'll call the next generation of phones, which will have the ability to ... golly, what? I can't even imagine. But it's a sure thing that the current generation of iPhones et al. will someday seem quaintly primitive. At that point, it's hard to imagine that we'll still be calling them smartphones. Or what we'll call the new ones.

Under the table and DRMing

I was in a meeting at work the other day when someone emitted a sentence that started this way:

I got some information DRM'd to me that …

It took me a second to parse this. (In fact, I think I got so interested in DRM'd that might have missed what it was that had in fact been DRM'd.)

DRM stands for digital rights management, which is a blanket term for protecting (or "protecting," if you want to be more cynical) digital media like, say, music files or movies. Let's say for convenience that it means something like "restrict." It's a pretty easy leap to turn this into a verb, and indeed, Mr. Google tells us that there are several hundred thousand instances of the term DRM'd . (Exercise for the student: calculate the percentage of these mentions in which the term is used in a positive way, haha.)

What threw me in the particular usage I heard, tho, was that DRM was being used as a verb that meant more than just "restricted": the information had been DRM'd to the recipient. This, I think, requires a particular context to make sense, a context that happens to obtain where I work, but probably is not all that widespread. (Maybe it is; y'all can tell me.)

Our email system at work is based on Microsoft Exchange and uses Microsoft Outlook as its client. This combination of technologies supports a feature named Information Rights Management whereby the author of an email can set restrictions/permissions on an email message for who can see it, and which restricts things like whether you can forward the message or even copy from it.

By saying I got information DRM'd to me, our interlocutor had managed to compress into this one verb that a) she had received an email via Outlook that b) had been tagged with IRM permissions because c) it had "eyes only" information, and that d) she could not forward us this information.

If was pretty good information density for an off-the-cuff remark. I have not (that I know of) heard DRM used as a verb in exactly this way before. It might be a one-off that occurred to her in the moment. Even if it is more widespread than that, this exact usage seems like it would be restricted to a limited context in which all of the conditions (permissions + Outlook) apply.

Gasmic consciousness, Part II

I while back we visited -gasm as a productive suffix. It's still going strong, as evidenced by some nice examples I've run across recently. For example, I found this in a comment about a political ad that featured a lot of (intended-to-be) stirring images of America:

The patriotgasm certainly seems Michael Bay-like.

This sent me searching, which yielded the following without much effort:

• Twitter-gasm
• Super Bowl stat-gasm
• Moore-gasm (as in, Michael Moore)
• snow gasm (a puerile bit from a comedy site)
• sports-gasm
• geekgasm
• gun-gasm
• Obama-gasm
• higher ed-gasm

These came up, by the way, because they are either political sites (hence "patriot") or sports sites (hence "New England Patriots").

Update 20 March 2011: "Apple starts this frenzy or what I call an iGasm." (#)

Something of note here is that the meaning of -gasm as used in these examples seems to still primarily be "intense or unrestrained excitement", but that it seems also to have a negative connotation in almost all of these examples. It's used derogatorily to refer to people who have unrestrained enthusiasm for something the author is not enthusiastic about (guns, Obama, people's use of Twitter) -- a kind of after-the-fact "Don't have a cow" wish. That was not the case last time we visited -gasm. Perhaps it has to do with the narrow search I did. (?)

Lost in the search-result woods

The proto-conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey used to use the phrase "Page 2" to segue from the news portion to the advertisement portion of his show. This became a beloved catchphrase, and in his case, the transition proved to be a goldmine for his sponsors.

For a Google search, tho, it's all about page 1; according to one study, "sites surveyed received more than 95% of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one results." There's a lively industry around getting a site onto Google's first page. Because if you're not on page 1, you are ... what? "In the wilderness"? "At the back of the pack"?

Tom Krazit, for one, has a term for it:

Links to prominent services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Flickr carry a lot of weight with Google, and can push unwanted content to the Google Ghetto, otherwise known as page two.

It's not a very PC term. Even among objective definitions, there aren't any that suggest that a ghetto has positive connotations, not to mention the complex associations between ghetto and touchy socio-economic issues.

But you have to admit that the phrase does evoke the idea of a place you probably don't want to live. And there's the catchy alliteration.

I can't at the moment find any other use of this term to mean the same thing. Or let's say that if there are other mentions, they're not on page ... haha, too easy.

Making your web presence go dark

When you log out of your computer or out of a website, you're terminating your current interaction with it. And pretty much that's that, because these intermittent conversations you have with the thing are pretty much the extent of your interaction.

But social media brings a new wrinkle to the game. You might log out of (say) Facebook, but your cyberpresence remains out there for other people to interact with. For most people, that's perfectly fine, and they are happy to come back later, log back in, and see what all their friends (er, Friends) have had to say to them.

For various reasons, however, there are those who want to treat a social-media network like Facebook only as an interactive/synchronous medium. They log on and interact with their friends. But when they're done, they don't just log out. They deactivate their Facebook account entirely, so that others cannot see it at all until it's reactivated.

Turns out there's a name for this: super logout, or variously super logoff.

I first heard about this in a blog post by the social researcher danah boyd:

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. Michael Ducker calls this practice “super-logoff” when he noticed a group of gay male adults doing the exact same thing.

In a related tweet linked to the blog post, user zephoria says "My students talk abt this call it 'whitewashing' or 'whitewalling.'"

The term has gotten a lot of attention right away:

• New York Magazine: Lessons From Teenagers: The Art of the Facebook Super Log-Off
• Lifehacker: Use the "Super-Logoff" Technique to Exercise Tighter Control Over Your Facebook Profile (11/9/10)
• wikiHow: How to Super Logout on Facebook (11/11/10)
• urlesque*: New Facebook Trend - The 'Super-Logoff' (11/11/10)

In pedantic technical ways, the term is not accurate, but it feels like it's sticky, for two reasons that I can think of. One is that no better term really suggests itself. The obvious one -- deactivate -- while possibly more accurate, sounds kind of technical. And -- second reason -- deactivate does not get at the intent of this new practice, which of course is, not just to log yourself off Facebook, but log your Facebook presence off.

And now, of course, I must post about this on Facebook so that I can see what people think of it tomorrow. :-)

* Clever name, that.

Or alternatively, to Ging

We're not sure if this really is an emergent term, but let's just say it seems like one that's inevitable (obvious?), tho its stickiness is not guaranteed. Correspondent Seth today spotted this in an email that was internal to Microsoft:

... [blah-blah] the number hasn't been zero since early 2006 in my quick boogle.

Seth comments: "Given that it was an MSFT employee, I think he was trying to hint that he's used both major search engines." (One would have to understand that there is a certain informal peer pressure inside Microsoft to a) not use google as a verb and b) use Bing as search engine.)

The reason I say that the term seems obvious is that it's a natural formation that moreover has been claimed already: there is the site booglesearch.com, which searches both engines and presents results side by side.

Beyond that, tho, things get murkier. (To me.) The site boogle.com does a Google search but presents you with a page that displays a quotation and a picture in lieu of the standard Google home page. (Oh.) No tie to Bing that I can deduce. There's Boogle the game, which looks (to me) like a trademark-skirting variant on the game I know as Boggle.

The exceptionally unreliable Urban Dictionary lists one definition of boogle as:

A negative result to having Googled a person; to be shocked or repulsed by what you find out about a person you have just Googled; to Google someone with the intention of finding out something negative about them.

But really, that's as much as I've found in my few moments of poking around. We'll have to keep an ear out.

Stars of a different type

Wow, when did this become a productive suffix?

• Rhee is a Grade-A edu-lebrity [#]
• [Y]ou're far more likely to be picking through the sausage-makings as they just sort of spray willy-nilly out of the meat grinder of news-lebrity that has replaced the news. [#]
• Ever want to know what it's like to log into Twitter as your favorite Twitter-lebrity? [#]
• And there are perks to being a bona fide Z-lebrity [#]
• Bornstein refers to herself as a "sub-lebrity" [#]

Update 9 April 2011: Here's a nice one: "'Glee' piano player happy as a 'sub-lebrity'. (Brad Ellis in the background of "Glee" as the club's accompanist.)

There's also C-lebrity, which appears in a number of guises, but most popularly as the name of a song by Queen, which of course dates it considerably. But it's unclear to me whether this is really intended to mean anything other than celebrity.

Anyway, this is another cran-morphy rejiggering of the morphological elements of the original, in which celebr is the nominal root, but in which -lebrity becomes instead the productive bit. (See also cheese-burger etc.)

These all strike me as pretty clever, but my sense is that they work better in written language than said out loud. A number of them are a bit awkward to say, possibly because they end up with sound sequences that don't entirely work -- news-lebrity, Twitter-lebrity. In the examples that are easier to pronounce (Z-lebrity, sub-lebrity), the aural resemblance to the original would require very careful enunciation to get across the point of the new formation. Still, it's always handy to have some new materials for making words.

We will now focus obsessively on something dumb

I've actually been inchoately wondering whether there's a term for this. This could be one:

Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press.

(Source: an article in Slate.) This seemed sort of Whorfian to me, inasmuch as we could crystalize the concept by coming up with a word for it. It sure does seem like we need a handy way to refer to these periodic episodes of press insanity, where 30 people in some state somewhere all of a sudden are headline news around the world. It would be best, of course, if the term were apolitical -- think of Balloon Boy.

Or is there already such a term?

One millennium, two ...

I have this notion, which is admittedly somewhat idiosyncratic, that when foreign words join the ranks of English, they don't get to bring along all their foreign-word baggage -- their plurals, their conjugations, or anything else that would require an English speaker to somehow have to intuit the rules for that word in its original tongue. No, because the word has joined English, which already has rules for these sorts of things, and in the fine print of the contract that the word signed upon joining the language, it explicitly says that it must abide by house rules.

Nonetheless, people get theyselves worked up these things. Not terribly long ago, I essentially laid all this out when someone asked what the plural should be of the car known as the Prius. Easy, sez me: in English, the default way to make plurals is to add -(e)s, so, hey, Priuses. All this fancy talk about what the plural would be if this were a Latin word is just piffle, because we're not talking about Latin, we're talking about English.

Ask folks what the plural is of octopus, and yer more edumacated types will tell you it's octopi, because something-something-Greek-something-something. Or cactus, or focus, or schema, or -- heh-heh -- opus.

Now, I would not say that it's wrong to say that the plurals are octopi or cacti or foci or schemata or opera. But I will also staunchly defend octopuses and cactuses and focuses and schemas and opuses. Because these latter words all follow normal rules, and because if I were a native speaker of English, I would find those to be perfectly reasonable ways to make the plural forms. (Hey, wait, I am, and I do!)

Ok. Surely among the more conservative publications in terms of these things is the New York Times, yes? Yet behold this thing that they have printed:

(I make you a picture in case some editor at the Times get a gander at this, haha.)

Surely this is unusual for a publication, is it not? Google reports a mere 425,000 hits for this term, versus around 6 million for the term millennia (where the plural ends in -a because something-something-Latin-something-something).[1]

Having read this far, tho, you will not be surprised to hear me say that I cheer the NYT for this. I'm sure they'll get letters from folks who want us all to know Latin declensions, but fie on those people. And I say to the word millennium, welcome to English, after all these years!

[1] This is not to be confused with the Mazda Millenia (sic), a singular car with a plural name, which we forgive because marketing has yet another set of rules, among them being "let's not let grammar get in the way of a good brand."

Update 1 Aug: Apparently I had a thought about millenniums in an earlier post. I guess this obsesses me, I just keep forgettting that it does.

Update 1 Aug: Per Ben, fixed all the spellings, oops. :-) This actually upped the count for the non-native plural (millennia) to more like 10 million.

Update 5 Oct: Mark Liberman posts on the Language Log about the plural of syllabus. Interesting comment in the thread from Henning Makholm speculating a bit about the use of -i as a productive plural marker in English, not just a fossil on foreign borrowings.

Scaling the digital walls

Another term that's new to me (maybe I should stop saying this, I'm perpetually behind these days): jailbreak as a verb. Of course, we all know that guys in stripy pajamas tunnel out of prison all the time (hey, I watch movies), but this would be a somewhat new usage. Also, it's invariably spelled as oneword.

Jailbreak-the-verb as I recently found it is specific to computers. Here's a definition from YourDictionary.com:

To get out of a restricted mode of operation. For example, jailbreaking may enable content with digital rights to be used on any computer, or it may allow enhanced third-party operating systems or applications to be used on a device.

It's therefore a subspecies of hacking (or cracking, for the more precise). Something interesting to me is that for the moment, and although this term is theoretically generic to computers, it seems to turn up almost exclusively in discussions around the iPhone and his cousins and his sisters and his aunts. Even relatively deep searching into Google still turns up iPhone and iPad references.

It's certainly not an unknown term -- Google get 1.6 million hits. Although I did specify "+computer" as part of the search, I suspect that this includes the traditional use of the term as a noun.

Morphologically, the verb follows normal rules for to break. Thus, the past is jailbroken. It's a transitive verb -- you jailbreak your iPhone, and the iPad was jailbroken.

One reason I am probably not so up on this term is that I don't own any of the devices in the i-Family. It certainly sounds like there's a, um, thriving ecosystem for getting around restrictions in that computer family's design. I expect there's a lesson in there for vendors, but that would not be a topic for this blog. :-)

Party flavors

On the tiniest chance that you missed it, surely the word of the week is -- tada! -- Teabonics: creative spellings (as they say) on political signs during rallies. There's a collection on Flickr.

Here's an example:

I just find the neologism irresistible. :-)

Handy handible

A comment thread on the CodeProject.com site raises an interesting question about word formation. (Well, spelling, maybe.) The original question is this:

So, Google gives a whopping 722 hits for "handible", Googling for "define: handible" shoots beside the target and reference.com has never heard of it in any form.

You English speakers out there - is "handible" a real word? If not, would you understand me anyway if I said that "Oh, you know, this is really handible!" ?

Most of the Google hits in question are bogus -- either the term is dynamically inserted into a search result to drive traffic (no links, thank you), or is clearly being used by non-native speakers. (And bless them for trying to write in English).

Most instances seem to be attempts to spell handleable (a word that the spell checker in Firefox does not like), like this example about a phone:

Its is smat, handible and easy to use. it as long durability and an outstanding design which gives it that cute look. i would recomend the phone for basic mobile phone users.

But there are a couple of interesting hiccups. One is that this term (or just this spelling) is more prevalent (relatively) among people who are writing about animals. Here's one example where the guy is talking about a snake:

Hey guys my names Joe and im a proud snake lover i used to have a gorgeous sunglow male corn until my goddaughter fell in love with it and i gave it to here. looking to get another as he was very timid and handible.

You can ascribe this simply to poor spelling, but if so, it's a poor spelling that's spreading, at least a bit. I've found handible used in a similar way when people are writing about a gecko, bunny, spider, and water dragon. (What's a precise definition for how these folks are using handible?)

And there's a curious instance of the term in a patent application:

Currently available braided suture products are acceptable in terms of their knot-tying and knot-holding properties. However, as removed from the package, they tend to be stiff and wiry and retain a "set" or "memory" such that at the time of use, it is usually necessary for the surgeon or assistant personnel to flex and stretch the suture to make it more readily handible. Furthermore, the surfaces of known sutures are perceptibly rough. Thus, if one passes one's hand or fingers along the braid, surface irregularities will be readily detected.

I say "curious" because I would have thought that patent applications, at least as posted on the Web, would have cleaned-up spelling, and if so, this is the intended spelling. (Perhaps I'm wrong about that.) And if so, this might be a technical term. Whatever it is, the intended meaning seems different to me than what the pet owners are talking about.

The examples form the various animal forums are the most interesting to me. I like to think that one possible outcome here is that in the context of ... what would you call it? ... pet husbandry? the word handible becomes (first) informally established as an offshoot from handleable, that it becomes a bona-fide field-specific word (breeders talk about breeding handible animals), and it eventually achieves legitimate status as a standalone term.

Your thots?

Try out our new giant comment threads

A couple terms only recently noted by me, tho not brandly new by any means.

Freemium. A word whose origins, unusually, are known very precisely (if one trusts Wikipedia, I mean). This refers to a business model in which you give away a basic version of your product and charge for a more-capable version. The term and the business model were both supposedly coined in 2006.

The term has caught on -- about 365K hits on Google -- but I still kind of scratch my head. One is that I am not getting how this exactly differs from the idea of a "demo version" or just a free sample that has been around since the birth of the first salesman.

A second thing about the the term is that it conveys a slightly wrong idea to me. When I think of free + premium I don't think of "there's a free version, and there's a premium version." My initial impression is that it's a "free, premium" version. Obviously, I'm not getting the "correct" definition, since the term refers to a business model and not to a thing per se. Still.


Threadnaught. A long and active thread (e.g. blog-post comment thread). For example, in a comment thread about IQ and political views, one of the earlier comments in the thread (out of 454 at last count) predicted: "It's gonna be a threadnaught." This is a clever hack on dreadnaught, which is a term that I sense is not in everyday use in the U.S. (got no specific stats to back this, tho), and which I for one know primarily in the military context of a large class of battleship. (Read a lot of military history in my younger days.)

Update 5 April 2010: Oh, hello, I realized where else I know the term dreadnought from: guitars. A dreadnought guitar is basically what you think of when you think of an acoustic guitar. I note that the word was in fact derived from the same term used for a battleship: i.e., a big 'un.

All right, back to reading comments ...

Sticky with me

Any interest group with a Web presence generally coalesces around a forum, which is where people can ask questions and others can post answers. Forums are generally divided into topics, and the Q&As are displayed in reverse-chronological order. Here's one I'm familiar with:




As with blogs, older posts fall off the front page. Now and then, the site administrators will decide that a post should not scroll off into history (for example, an FAQ or an announcement post), so they will configure it to be permanently visible at the top:



What's the verb for doing this? Had you asked me, I would have said that you were pinning the post to the top of the forum. To pin a post is a common enough term, which derives, obviously, from the idea of pinning something to a bulletin board.

A post thusly pinned is also said to be sticky. This is another fairly obvious derivation. The dictionaries I have immediately to hand don't list a definition for sticky that refers to a persistent idea or thought, but that usage is all over the Web, and certainly got a big boost from the book Made to Stick.[1]

So. Using the Magic of Language, you can combine the verbiness of pinning and the adjectiveness of sticky to come up with a new term. Yes you can, as evidenced in a quote from an article on Arstechnica:

I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do.

There are a surprising number of hits for this term. I get around 370K on Bing, 450K on Google. Here's a great example:

Stickied threads are being unstickied!

What's notable, of course, is that the new verb was invented in a roundabout fashion (to stick -> sticky -> to sticky), instead of the plausible usage evolving from simply saying that a post was stuck in a forum. But the new usage has advantages; saying that a post is stuck in a forum is ambiguous, whereas saying that the post is stickied is quite clear.

It's hard to tell whether to sticky is actually used in any form but the participle; it's tricky to search for to sticky as a verb, because of the prevalence of phrases like [lead] to sticky [situations]. If you run across an example of the infinitive or present participle, I'd love to hear about it.


[1] I must say, the cover of that book, which illustrates a piece of duct tape, was brilliant.

App-rehension

In my world (computers), the term app has been short for application since approximately forever. That's what the industry has always done -- created apps like Lotus 1-2-3, or Quicken, or that thing they use at the dentist to to schedule your next appointment.

But in my corner of my world -- editing -- any mention in draft documentation of an app has always been expanded into the more formal term application. The idea is that app is programmer slang.

But is it any more, I wonder? I'm thinking here of the Apple iPhone, which has done a lot in latter days for, um, mainstreaming the term app. It's not an entirely given thing just yet; here's a bit from their Web site (web site, website):

Applications for iPhone are like nothing you’ve ever seen on a mobile phone. Explore some of our favorite apps here and see how they allow iPhone to do even more.

I interpret "Applications for iPhone ... some of our favorite apps" as a vestigial acknowledgment that there might be 4 people left who use an iPhone and who have not yet made the connection between application and app. But that's about the only place I can find that still does this -- it's otherwise the App Store, Apps for iPhone¹, etc.

So my question is whether app is now firmly entrenched as a general term for applications or whether non-programmer types now think of it as something specifically for the iPhone. Has Apple succeeded in co-opting some programmer slang into not just general use, but in something that reinforces their own brand name? Pretend you're not a programmer. If you hear the word app, do you think application, or do you think iPhone application?


¹ Note that Apple's own branding is Apple iPhone, no the. Common usage is the iPhone, but those of us who have to think about trademarks have to be careful when referencing this device in, for example, our official documentation.

Thank goodness it's abou-tober

There's something about the name October that seems to inspire the urge to play. There's a certain mellifluous quality to the name that we don't have with other months (heck, people can barely pronounce February). And that -tober on the end makes a satisfying particle onto which you can join practically anything, it seems. We've all heard a local radio station advertise its Rocktober lineup (a term also in use by Guitar Center and, it seems, about 300,000 other folks, if Google is to be believed).

Just how productive an ending is -tober, do you suppose? A few minutes of seaching has turned up the following:

• Crocktober -- promotion by the Crock-Pot(tm) company of their slow-cooker line.
• Motor-Tober -- from the MINI (car) people.
• Biketober -- There's Biketoberfest for motorcycles in Daytona Beach, and Biketober for bicycles at various locations.
• Slot-tober at a casino.
• Mr. A-Rod-tober -- A designation for the Yankees slugger, formerly known as Mr. Flop-Tober.
• Sports'tober -- An appreciation for the many varieties of sports played in this month.
• Bock-tober -- Seasonal beer for a seasonal fest.
• Scotchtober -- Oktoberfest for malt lovers.
• Hot-tober -- whining about the heat in Florida.
• Dogtober -- various ways to help our furry friends.

Good, if predictable, fun. Are there rules? Interestingly, almost all the examples here have a vowel that's in the same vowel neighborhood as Oct-. (The most common variant -- Rocktober -- is of course a perfect rhyme.) The word to be joined to -tober seems, from these examples, at least, to require a closing consonant. I would initially have guessed that any new prefix would have to be monosyllablic, but A-Rod-tober and Motor-tober appear to be counter-evidence.

What else can we come up with for examples, rules, or idle speculation?

Approvaled

Another instance of a past tense that makes you go "huh?"

ABC has officially greenlit a pilot for its reworking of "V," the 1980s miniseries about alien lizards coming down to Earth.

(I got this from a Twitter post, but it seems to be a cite from elsewhere.)

I think my instinct would be to use greeenlighted. Probably (again) because we (well, I) like "regular" patterns for verbs and nouns, e.g., whacking -ed onto a verb for a past tense.

I briefly wondered about to light as a transitive verb; historically, I believe, this would have made it regular. But lit sounds right(er): He lit the way with a flashlight. Even so, greenlit sounds odd to me.

Obligatory Google search results:

greenlit: 256,000
greenlighted: 116,000

Superizory role

Another one I've apparently missed. This is from an article about using Plurk:

On to some extras to uberfy your plurking!

So ... uber is the new super. (I actually blogged about this several hundred years ago.) Therefore, to uberfy is to make super-duper, yes? One might say that it's akin to pimping: On to some extras to pimp your plurking!

I do like it, tho as a former student of the Germanics, I still have a hard time letting go of Mr. Herr Umlaut. (And for that matter, front rounded vowels.)

Incidentally, the article from which this comes includes a link to Plurk that is labeled as obviated for invites. I understand about invitations/invites to join certain Web-based communities, but I can't say that I can figure out exactly what the author means by obviated in this context. (Obviously, I'm not going to be getting any invites to Plurk anytime soon.)

Social studies

I heard a usage today, twice, that sent me scurrying to the dictionary. (Well, to Google, but that led to the dictionary.) Considering that I work in high-tech, you'd think I'd be au courant with late-breaking linguistic developments. Perhaps I don't go to enough meetings.

Anyway, the term in question is socialize. Obviously, we all know it in the context of chatting at cocktail parties and the like. And after peeking at the dictionary I allow as how you can transitively socialize, say, a feral dog. (You can do so grammatically, if not always in reality.)

Yon dictionary also uncovered a couple of transitive usages that I am not very familiar with:

2 a: to constitute on a socialistic basis <socialize industry> b: to adapt to social needs or uses

3: to organize group participation in <socialize a recitation>

Can't say that I've ever consciously heard either of these usages.

But the usage I heard today was subtly different yet. At a meeting today, we were discussing a particular technique that we'd like people to use, and the boss said We need to socialize that.

A few editorial eyebrows twitched at that. I attributed it to a slip of the tongue and that what was meant was We need to evangelize that, which is a pretty common thing in our corporate lingo. Sell it. Talk it up.

But then later today, by golly, I attended a panel discussion about blogging, and one of the participants said this: I socialized the term "blog smart."

Hearing the second instance within mere hours made it clear that I just had totally missed this one. So, a bit of Web-based research revealed that the phrase socialize the idea (as but one possible phrase for this usage) has a couple thousand hits.

Web searching also turned up a couple of attempted definitions. This one is from Terrence Seamon:

The concept of "socializing" refers to the interpersonal communication process of building support for an idea or course of action by visiting with key stakeholders one at a time.

From the page 7 Buzzwords Every Content Provider Should Know*:

[T]his word means "to spread an idea with the hope that familiarity will gain it acceptance or build a consensus." Sentence: "After I write an article I like, I socialize the idea with social bookmarks."

In this blog post, they're simply taking it as a synonym for "familiarize," but in the comments people suggest slightly different definitions, for example:

[S]ocializing to me often means convincing a group – frequently by leading the members of that group to believe they helped to develop the idea.

And:

Familiarization is a passive activity (I expect the team to learn it) whereas socialization is an active activity (I am responsible to teach it). It is in that teaching that the idea may undergo some changes and or modifications that may aid in its adoption or rejection.

It's mildly interesting to encounter a new (to me) word like this, but somewhat more interesting to discover that although the core idea is something like "sell personally," the exact definition is a little elusive. Of course, this is hardly the only example.


* I think they're not counting the buzzword content provider in the title.

As I lied dying

What's generally termed "confusion"* between lie and lay is widespread and has been for a long time. It's more accurate to say that the semantic space occupied by lie is encroached upon to a large degree by lay, so that one hears things like:

I'm going to lay down.
The girls like to lay out in the sun.
etc.

Part of the problem is surely that the past-tense forms add to the, um, confusion. The verb lay is transitive (to put something into a prone position), and like good transitive verbs in Germanic languages, it follows a regular ("weak") pattern for forming its constituent parts:

present: lay. I'm going to lay the book on the table.
past: laid. Yesterday I laid the book on the table.
participle: laid. All of us have laid books on the table.

(Compare, say, talk.) The verb lie, on the other hand, in the sense of being in a prone position, is intransitive and in the manner of some Germanic verbs, is thus irregular ("strong"):

present: lie. The book lies on the table.
past: lay. Yesterday, the book lay on the table.
participle: lain. The book has lain on the table all day.

(This last sounds odd even to me, so rarely does one hear this conversationally.) It's easy to see that a present-tense lay is easy to confuse with a past-tense lay, for example. And in the world of Germanic weak and strong verbs, if you're going to bet on which form will prevail, the weak form is your better bet by a long shot.

So. Blah-blah. Why am I telling you this? Because Michael B has found such a nice example where this gets really confuddled:

That's when Perkins missed for the second time in the game. He was wide left from 28 yards with 3:24 left in regulation, then missed wide right from 37 in the second overtime. Perkins lied on his back as Martin Stadium erupted at the possibility of a shocking upset.

(Hopefully they haven't fixed this by the time you read it.)

As I say, if you're going to bet on verbs, bet on weak verbs; given half a chance, people will whack a -d onto the end of anything that looks like a verb.


* I adamantly refuse to say that this is "wrong." But then, I would.