Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Longing for the future that was

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In the New York Times Sunday Magazine this last week (Jun 13, 2014), Eric Schulmiller has an essay  (paywall, probably) about our fondness ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Some herstory of sheroes

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I ran across a terms recently that was new to me but not particularly new in absolute terms. This was shero —a combination of she + hero t...
Sunday, June 22, 2014

Poring over the straits of spelling

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There are a couple of words that I feel like I see misspelled with some frequency, including among people who "should know better,...
2 comments:
Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Frecking awesome

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Here's a term you'll be seeing a lot in the near future: frecking, as in Google Frecking . Here's the definition from what seem...
Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Exeunt from the C-suite

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A nice coinage that showed up in my feed today, tho it's from an article that's a couple of years old: ' Execudus ' in Re...
Sunday, October 27, 2013

How do we do it? Volume

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One thing (the only thing?) we can thank the NSA's vast snooping effort for is the popularization of the term  bulk spying . Open up a n...
Friday, October 18, 2013

An assortment in advance

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I was assigned the task today of acquiring a batch of donuts for my group at work. At the donut place I told the girl I wanted a dozen, and ...
4 comments:
Monday, June 24, 2013

The singularity of premise

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One of my colleagues recently sent me a mild complaint about the use of  premise  in this context: AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to est...
3 comments:
Thursday, January 17, 2013

0day, 0dear

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Here are a couple of small but interesting wordy things in a post by Brian Krebs about the recent Java (programming language) security vuln...
Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Precious, technology style

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Here's a term that you'll occasionally now see in reference to the newer generation of computer form factors: fondleslab . (Or a var...
Monday, October 29, 2012

Doxic fallout

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A recent brouhaha about the outing of the notorious troll Violentacrez brought to prominence a term that's been around for a while, but...
Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The new ... laptoplet?

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Something amusing from an article  in Buzzfeed about the new (so new it doesn't exist yet) Microsoft Surface , a.k.a. the new Microsoft ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, June 12, 2012

A menagerie of failure

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Among my duties at work is to review error messages, and one of our guiding principles is to understand that the user (in our case, the user...
Sunday, May 13, 2012

Order takes its knoll

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On Facebook, Friend Wendy alerts me to a term that I did not previously know: the verb to knoll . This refers to aligning or squaring things...
Monday, May 07, 2012

Computer not included

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A couple of times in the last week I've run across the term BYOD: Bring Your Own Device. In what looks like  the most common usage today...
Sunday, March 25, 2012

Take an economic upturn and call me in the morning

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Ran across a term in Slate today that is new enough, or self-conscious enough, that they had it in quotation marks: Emily Bazelon has been...
4 comments:
Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The season's best political term?

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A term that I'm sure the original utterer (Eric Fehrnstrom) now regrets having used: Etch-a-Sketch . The context is a discussion about t...
4 comments:
Monday, March 19, 2012

Vote for me, por favor!

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Over on the New Yorker Online site, Silvia Killingsworth has coined and is trying hard to push a term she invented. Here's the context...
2 comments:
Monday, February 27, 2012

Building privacy

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A couple of terms today that aren't new, or not very. Both represent the verbing of some buildings, but what struck me was that I found ...
1 comment:
Monday, November 14, 2011

Create + Update = ?

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In the world of databases, you can perform what are generally (and amusingly) referred to as CRUD operations -- create, read, update, and d...
2 comments:
Thursday, October 27, 2011

I can C you now

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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 ...
4 comments:
Sunday, October 23, 2011

Why a Duck?

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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 mak...
Monday, October 17, 2011

Just throw some text at it

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We've mused here before about the interesting "up" particle that can be added to so many verbs ( man up , whip up , bulk up ,...
2 comments:
Friday, October 14, 2011

"Hello, World"

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Over on my main blog, I have a piece on how Dennis Ritchie's influential book The C Programming Language introduced the phrase "He...
Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Let's (cohort) party down

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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...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A smarter way to app

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The Windows Phone people are rolling out a new version of the operating system, known officially as Windows Phone 7.5, known unofficially by...
3 comments:
Monday, September 12, 2011

One Nissan Leaf, two Nissan ...

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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 ....
2 comments:
Thursday, September 01, 2011

The honey badgers of web development

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First there was the honey badger, a badger-like creature that's apparently known for its "ferocious defensive abilities." T...
1 comment:
Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Organize and humorize

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A little tongue-in-cheek (mostly) humorization from The New Yorker : I say "mostly" because although they used a hyphen in ...
Friday, August 12, 2011

True only if you don't say it about yourself

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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 ...
4 comments:
Friday, August 05, 2011

One media to rule them all

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Not a surprising neologism in retrospect, but then again, good ones always seem obvious after the fact: Welcome to the first murdochracy Thi...
Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Legitimate illegitimists?

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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 sho...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011

PepsiCo and the future of snack terms

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The May 16, 2011 edition of The New Yorker has a fascinating article (" Snacks for a Fat Planet ," paywall) about the PepsiCo...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 31, 2011

From Greek battles to all-day presentations

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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 d...
4 comments:
Monday, April 04, 2011

It's useless, but somehow not

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Twitter. Even ardent supporters admit that if you describe Twitter in simple terms ("you post whatever pops into your head, many times ...
2 comments:
Friday, April 01, 2011

Truthiness and falsiness

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Stephen Colbert put the term truthiness on the map (pdf), but there is a context where the terms truthy and falsy have another, quite pr...
4 comments: