Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone' If you like this story, don't say it blows you away. And if you don't like it, please don't give your correspondent a kicking. Instead, refer to a Cisco blog post from last week that outlines the networking giant's view on "Inclusive Leadership via Language". The post points out that language matters. "Why practice inclusive …
"That'll kill two birds with one stone" is suggested as not suitable to remain in your vocabulary, with "That'll feed two birds with one scone" preferred.
Depends which Cisco office it is I guess. If it's one of those countries that still stones birds if they commit adultery, I guess it could be offensive. If it's in the US, it could still be offensive if the birds think you're implying they're too fat already and should share a scone. Or too skinny. Or you're being stingy and don't want to provide a scone each. Or if served the traditional way, 1 scone feeds 2 cos it's sliced in half. Then it may provoke an arguement or fight about whether each half should have jam spread first, or cream.
And then, like with much political correctness, it inverts reality. Objective is to kill two birds. Revised objective is to feed them, which would just encourage them to breed, carp over everything and come back for more. See signs in places like Trafalgar Square telling tourists not to feed the birds. So instead of solving the problem, and potentially getting the makings of a tasty pigeon pie, the new wording just makes the problems grow larger. Plus it'll spread crumbs everywhere.
But it is Costc.. I mean Cisco.
With enough cream and jam, wouldn't "kill two birds with one scone" be more appropriate?
That comes under the "no violence" rule using the word "kill". So many rules...<sigh> I guess it's time to go out back, link arms, and sing "Kum ba yah" .
Too much BS in world. I think I should just try to ignore it. On the other hand, it is prime fertilizer.
Birds are not built to live on scones. It is an unhealthy diet. Also, it builds dependency, which exposes birds to more risks. We've got signs up in all wetlands directing people not to feed the birds, but they do it anyway. Moving phrases like this into common language is not going to help.
Yes, I am actually offended by this. Call me narrow, but how stupid and ignorant does she have to be to think "feed two birds with one scone" is actually a good a good idea?
Disclaimer:- I am the contrarian who puts JoF on one half and CoF on the other; I have no axe to grind.
SWMBO says "if your nostrils aren't plugged with cream each time you take a bite, you don't have enough cream" mind you she also doesn't like putting any butter on her scones so there is that.
Personally if you have butter (and I do) I find the jam makes a good adhesion layer between the butter and cream. If, on the other hand, one decrys the golden goodness then the cream just replaces butter so CoF is the way to go.
Scone, Butter, Cream, Jam is, in my experience, a disaster waiting to happen, all those lubricated layers sliding across each other conspire to dump the jam in your lap (or, worse, your cup of tea)
As to feeding two birds with one scone - not going to happen; who ever has scones left over to feed the birds isn't taking the cream tea seriously enough.
For a pork roast, you have to soak the fat side in water for a couple of hours.
Hmm, never tried that. Usually want things dry to help make them crispy. I will however be considering "Vegan Pool Party and BBQ" events. I guess this is the reason why salt water pools are becoming more popular than chlorine, because it helps brine your 'guests' and doesn't taint the meat.. Or perhaps that just means others are way ahead of me in preparing for the vegepocalypse.
Ah I have just moved companies two highlights of leaving the corporate nightmare I was in was....
No longer having to use Clarity to record what I did every minute of the day.
Every other time I attempt to loginto it to make it up it would call me an invalid nonce until I connected via a new browser/cleared cookies.
And every install was a 'Child Incident' in the ticketing system which dispite discribing what that phrase conjures in the mind they never bothered to change.
But then again the leavers form was a MS forms document which was based on the quiz template so when you submitted it it offered you" to click here to see your score I the quiz"
And they managed to order Alphabetically the strongly disagree, slightly disagree neutral etc.
So it was displayed Slightly Agree Slightly Disagree Strongly Agree Strongly Disagree etc.
Not bad for a fortune 500 company :rolleyes:
New job... double the pay doing the same thing and a boss who calls you out if you don't to take a break and a very 'British' approach to the use of the English language.
On balance though, freezing is the best way to combat a maillard reaction in those unfortunate enough to be afflicted. Especially those in the baked LGBTQ+ (Linseed, Granary, Bloomer, Teff and Quinoa) community. I feel like everyone is represented these days, except for Bread.
"The lack of recent posts was attributed to the initiative having succeeded."
Actually, it's because the "initiative" is being completely ignored by the vast majority of people. I am still hearing whitelist and blacklist, master & slave, hanging processes and etc. pretty much all over Silly Con Valley, which is one of the most mixed melting pots on the planet. Nobody seems to have any issue with it ... EXCEPT a few holier than thou loudmouths.
These words have technical meanings, when used in a technical manner. If you are offended when I discuss the master clock on my network, or the slave cylinders on my car's brakes, or the blacklist of IP addresses that I block at the border routers, or what have you, when it is bloody obvious that there is absolutely zero intent for those words to have any negative meaning ... well, I respectfully suggest that you have deep seated issues to work through, and taking it out on my proper use of the English language isn't going to help matters any.
I am reminded that English has more words than any other language, by a factor of two or three I believe. So many options to be offended by!
How many of the people trying to piss around with English usage are actually offended by the usage, and how many are people trying hard to be offended on their behalf?
Or, presumably, sit, if you lack the ability to stand. Not that I wish to imply that only those requiring wheelchairs are disabled.
I’m being silly but the example in the article make about as much sense to me as this - if you take away everything but literal language then you destroy a languages character.
Eh, it's a weird dick-waving contest. Languages that make heavy use of smashing words together to make new ones will sweep to the top.
I find it funny that that list has Swedish above English - there's only one word that means "snail" and "slug". Just a little fact :)
Don't want to rain on your parade, but "slug" has multiple meanings in English: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slug
As I don't speak the lingo, I'm not able to say if there is just one Swedish word for all those meanings or if multiple words are used
Who cares how many words are in the English language when following that link also teaches you the utterly bonkers (oops, slaps self on wrist (oops, admonishes self in a non-violent manner)) Turkish word "Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız"...
As with much such claims, it depends on how you look at it. If you include scientific and technological terminology and so-called "import words" that are now quite common in English (pasta, sushi, etc.), most scholars would give a number that is somewhere North of 1,000,000 individual words, with more being added near daily.
Also, is a word like "post" one word, or many?
All in all, this is one of those silly subjects with no real answer that only exists for argument.
Which is always fun over a pint. My round, I think.
Interesting you used "Calm down dear" considering that "dear" "love" and "pet" have been actively discouraged in English county council's where in fact it's non gender or race based. A classic example of trying to "be inclusive" by wiping out it's actual intent
Words like "dear", "love", "pet"--and on this side of the pond--"honey"/"hon" are discouraged because they can be used to diminish the listener's stature. Of course, I rarely hear them used this way; mostly they're just a way to be friendly. The majority of words I see being banned are because someone fixated on one unusual meaning and ignored all the other meanings.
Also, "calm down" is discouraged, because it indicates that the speaker doesn't think the listener's emotions are valid.
"Words like "dear", "love", "pet"--and on this side of the pond--"honey"/"hon" are discouraged because they can be used to diminish the listener's stature"
If it's an old grandma serving tea at a tearoom, "dear", "love" and "pet" are to be expected. If it's a guy talking to their female colleague, it's patronising.
""calm down" is discouraged, because it indicates that the speaker doesn't think the listener's emotions are valid."
It's also useless. If the person being spoken to is already calm it's useless. If they are not calm, being told to calm down usually has the opposite effect
Snowflakes come on one flavo(u)r: Frozen water. Until they are polluted by humans, of course.
I'm not upset at all about so-called "inclusive" language. Use it all you like! Feel free, if it suits you. Just don't try to force other people to use it. Forcing other people to adopt your views has a name, and I seriously doubt you want to be called that name.
Nice use of "dear" in your rather failed attempt to talk down to me. Is talking down to people considered "inclusive" in your mind? Somehow it wouldn't surprise me ...
Snowflakes come on one flavo(u)r: Frozen water. Until they are polluted by humans, of course.
Aha! Thanks to a few non-snowflakes, like Kepler, Descartes, Hook etc.. We know that snowflakes actually rely on pollution and contaminants! So water condensing on a bit of dust, pollen, or tomato virus. Without pollution and contamination, there would be no snowflakes!
This is also why there's a conspiracy by climate believers. Some years ago, we were told that snow would be a thing of the past and kids wouldn't know what snow looked like. This was of course a prediction that was soon falsified. But hating to be proven wrong, the experts simply decided to ban airborne pollutants (or tax them). Fewer PM2.5 or less particles, less snow, and they can then claim they're right. It may also be a planetary defence mechanism against vehicles. They create a lot of dust, so more snow, more crashes, fewer vehicles.
We know what happens if you give in to these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky
First they come for your language, then for your freedom and finally for your life.
And no, it does not matter that they have teamed up with Big Business and Big Money. Actually, Marxism is a London Invention !
Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto whilst in - and based on his experiences in the slums of - Manchester. In the reading room at the lovely Chetham's library, if the head librarian there is to be believed, He was financially supported in doing this by Friedrich Engels.
"They don't even tell us what the words in the "fireable-offense list" are. I guess we'll only know when we're fired."
If they knew the words they would have to fire themselves.
Perhaps the sensible could learn to express themselves in classical Latin which should confound most of these newspeak loonies. If the word "slave" is removed from the vocabulary because of the concept it expresses then we probably also need to pull "server" if it is derived as I suspect from L. servus (slave.) Not even considering the word "client."
Unfortunately the most sensitive of these words which is most assuredly on the terminal list is also a perfectly innocent Latin word and isn't L. ruber, rubra. Lord knows how the basal ganglia fare nowadays - probably rechristened to something that is neither descriptive nor useful.
In more sensible times to disprove an assertion one might employ the method "reductio ad absurdum" but these days it appears that reducing a claim to the the rediculous is actually taken to confirm its validity.
Even Jarry's "Pataphysics" is sanity by comparison with much of this lunacy.
Exactly. I always imagine a "hanging process" as being similar to Wile E Coyote, in that state where he has run off the cliff edge and is in those moments where he is hanging (hint) in the air, but has not yet fully crashed to the ground… (Oh, crashed, that implies pain and injury, am I allowed to say that? «rolls eyes»)
The word 'hanging' in this context has nothing, repeat, absolutely nothing, to do with hanging as a form of execution or (trying to follow what I guess must have been their train of thought) lynching, and you would have to be a complete idiot to think otherwise. It refers, metaphorically, to the state of something hanging in the air (not hanging from a tree or gallows), and nothing more.
Yes, there are some words or phrases that it is probably better to change (master/slave, whitelist/blacklist being fairly obvious ones because there are certain connotations there that are probably best avoided, even if not intended in their technical usage), but, unfortunately, many of these language police then go off on a complete witch-hunt (oops - and, yes, perhaps that one does also merit avoidance) looking for offence in every word, where absolutely none could reasonably be inferred. Sadly such hyper-zealousness only serves to hide the reasonable proposals that they do make in an entire haystack of ludicrousness, making it more likely that their whole message will be regarded as idiotic and therefore ignored.
Actually, blacklist/whitelist isn't at all related to slavery or racism - it's far older. Black was a reference to evil (not skin tone, e.g. black-hearted, blackguard etc.) White was similarly a reference to being clean morally/ethically/spiritually. It had nothing to do with the color of the speaker OR the listener's skin.
Oh wait, that's euro-centric.
In Eastern cultural contexts, black can mean life/fertility, white can mean death. In fact, it's even more ludicrous. Why would slaves be black? Britons enslaved other britons. Dark-skinned folks enslaved pale skinned folks. Vikings enslaved (excuse me, _enthralled_) native Britons. OH wait look - someone's ACTUALLY using a term that means ACTUAL slavery in a positive sense. I was positively enthralled by your argument!
Can I have my religious/cultural usage _that has nothing to do with racial characteristics OR slavery_ back now?
It's not "black and white", per se, it's light and dark. Think about a small group of proto-humans a couple million years ago. Fearing the dark of night, because that's when the nocturnal predators hunted. The light of day brought relative safety. In other words "dark == bad, light == better" is embedded in our very genetics.
And let's not forget that those first early humans were undoubtedly dark skinned.
The entire concept of black vs white being a racist thing in this context is laughable.
"And let's not forget that those first early humans were undoubtedly dark skinned."
As late as the Mesolithic in N Europe, I think. In evolutionary terms that's quite recent. Light skin is only an adaptation to lack of sunlight & consequent reduced vitamin D production.
I have no data on this, but accepting your premise as true (because I have no problem with it being true OR false) it's irrelevant, and actually the kind of harm that started the OP and much of the discussion here;
It's folk etymology i.e. taking facts you know and having fun speculating if that might be an earlier reason for a particular view that went into a word usage. That's Fun With Flags™ territory. Fun if you're into it, harmless if you're not. Putting a spearpoint on the flag, handing to to Sheldon, and telling him someone is using a flag WRONG in an attempt to silence your critics or score political brownie points with the Party is very much not fun or funny anymore.
"Black was a reference to evil (not skin tone, e.g. black-hearted, blackguard etc.) White was similarly a reference to being clean morally/ethically/spiritually. It had nothing to do with the color of the speaker OR the listener's skin."
Maybe, but even in antiquity those references must have come from somewhere. AFAIK as early as first chapter of the bible it refers to black people being the descendants of someone who had been marked as evil by god (not sure of the exact reference but it's something like that). It's probably impossible to ever be sure about the true origins of the western culture use of black = bad, white = good, but it certainly has had both influence on and feedback from the concept of black-skinned humans = bad, white-skinned humans = good
AFAIK as early as first chapter of the bible it refers to black people being the descendants of someone who had been marked as evil by god (not sure of the exact reference but it's something like that).
That may be As Far As *You* Know, but it's not farther than *I* know. This is incorrect. Firstly, it was just 'a mark' nowhere in the bible is Cain discribed as being 'black.' And the mark was a mark of mercy to *protect* Cain from others who might be tempted to kill him. God didn't want more murders. Cain's punishment was a life sentence, not a death sentence. The black thing you're referring to came about because someone who already had a racist agenda went cherry-picking and distorting a simple 'mark' into 'he was made into a black person.' Similarly, the story NOW perpetuates itself among a different group who are already prejudiced against Judiasm/Christianity because they have this false narrative that the Bible is bad, so any story that confirms that bias with 'more ways the bible is bad' is accepted with lessened critical analysis. It's called confirmation bais, and we all do it semi-automatically. We couldn't survive well without it, but the mechanism has its misuses, like demonstrated here.
TLDR; this is a false understanding, and ironic to boot, because even if it was said cain was black (which is false, see above) the mark was a good thing, so if anything Genesis would be saying black = good.
"AFAIK as early as first chapter of the bible it refers to black people being the descendants of someone who had been marked as evil by god"
Have you ever even bothered to read the fucking book for yourself? Or are you like most adherents of the Abrahamic religions, and just parrot what you have been told?
D-, must try harder.
@cybersaber and @jake - well thanks for the information, and, I have to say, education.
I do have to apologise, and I hope you understand, that having being brought up in a strict Catholic environment, "reading the fucking book for myself" was rather frowned upon. I guess it's easier for kids to be educated indoctrinated by using carefully curated excerpts and summaries.
"brought up in a strict Catholic environment"
I'm sorry. Have beers.
I quite honestly think that most of humanity's problems would go away if everybody were to read, parse, and understand their version of a holy book or books (warts and all) before the age of 10. But that'll never happen, because the shamans would be out of work before a generation had passed, and we can't have that, now can we?
Large swaths of people still spout old, disproved science about monkeys on typewriters rather than what current field leaders actually say. It's not really warranted or fair to make a correlation between religion and uncritical acceptance of what you want to believe - whether that's Jainism, Taoism, or evolution. How many have read 'On the Origin of Species' or keep up with pre-print papers on Arxiv to see where the scientific consensus of the day is? That would be the atheists' version of 'read your holy book' but you'd be surprised how many folks don't know that the science has moved on from 'infinite monkeys on typewriters' to 'chance (alone) can't do it, so somehow the universe just stacked the deck this way. More research is needed because we don't know how the universe cheated yet.'
TLDR; We religious folk are the same Mark I humans as non religious folks, with the same mix of haters, bigots, and people just looking to justify what they want to be true. Not really fair to closely associate it as a primarily religious failing.
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I think every one of us here on ElReg has worked under a hanging ceiling.
The chandelier in my dining room hangs from the ceiling.
There are pictures hanging on my walls.
The roadbed of the Golden Gate Bridge is hanging from the suspension cables.
I just put new foundation in an old hive, it's hanging nicely in the frames.
Etc. etc. etc.
Says this is just another easy way for “experts” to charge more money while contributing nothing of value. Pay-per-incident customers now get to pay MSPs to change the letter a to be the letter o across policies ranging from server-side spam filters all the way through to web browser GPOs Additionally there’s now a need to remember every combination of language related to each time period, something the IT community wanted to avoid by standardising on historical words.
This stupidity is being sold to you by the same morons who brought us containers as a replacement for correctly named shared objects, the same blundering buffoons who gave us agile development and the same suits who bullied everyone at school!
"making a first pass"?? I'm sorry, what? That refers to either ships of the line passing each other for a broadside (with all the direct carnage that comes with that and the historical baggage attached to navy history on top of that) or to aircraft strafing ground positions. Far too violent! I take offence!
Some consultant must have been paid a pretty penny for this nonsense. Here I am thinking that if you get offended by basic language (be it pronouns or idioms) you have some personal issues to sort out first and maybe I don't want to hire you until you do...
Exactly Nelson's tactic at Trafalgar. Taking the early risk of being an easy target for the French broadside fire (but at a distance) while sailing perpendicularly into their line, to then be able to fire their own broadsides at very close range to the completely helpless French ships once they broke the French line.
And that's how this silliness happens. Cultural references are forgotten, people make uninformed guesses about their meaning. It happens with a living language. There's nothing wrong with that.
What irks me is when people make up their own version, and decide that it means something they don't like, and then demand that people who use it completely unrelated ways dating back to times before their country even existed and decide to chastise someone else for political points with their in-crowd. (BTW, the older-than-country-reference applies to us all. It's not an America reference, because black/white references are older than Rome OR China.)
Tomorrow I'm going to decide that 'to get one's goat' means something sexist, and will insist that no goats be gotten, and see how many people whose goats that gets.
My only reply is that takes two to tango. Progressives happen to be behind most of the stuff formerly known as "political correctness", but don't for one moment think that Conservatives are innocent in the "culture wars" (AKA wedge issues given by the sociopaths in charge so that we fight amongst ourselves instead of seeing what nefariousness they are up to).
So when the far left pushes its culture war ( see this article ), you are saying that Conservatives should ignore it and let it happen?
Because if they do, we'll end up in a worse world than we do now.
This is why the far left is telling people that the culture war is a Conservative construct - to try to shame them into letting the far left win.
Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells> So when the far left pushes its culture war
2 points:
1) When extreme RWNJs scream "far left" people reads that as, "Anyone who isn't a foaming RWNJ".
2) Culture War™® is the rallying cry used to keep to the RWNJs on the boil. Nothing more, nothing less. An invention of the Right. See also, "PC GAAWN MAAAAAAD"™® and "The War on Chrismas"™® (© Right Wing Media)
The "culture wars" aren't a construct of the left or the right, they're a construct of the extremist factions on both sides.
It would be much better if the majority in the middle just shake their heads at all the nonsense and carry on, but the whole point of the culture wars is to invent ever more ridiculous ideas to suck the sane centrists onto their side.
The left has declared centrism and pretty much anything that doesn't align exactly with <current thing> as 'far right'. You cannot take a balanced approach any more.
I used to be pro choice but with sensible limits as were most of my friends. With the far left pushing for what is effectively infanticide I'm not a supporter any more.
What one must remember is that the revolution the far left constantly calls for can never stop. They will never be happy, they will never demobilise. Once you've tasted the money, fame and political protection of being an activist you can't give up.
I dunno about hydroplaning, but there's sure a lot of screaming and a probable eventual crash.
The problem is that the Right Wing Nuts and the Left Wing Nuts are living on the opposite side of the same coin. They represent an extreme minority, and yet are extremely loud in their bellowing. Makes them seem far more important than they really are. The vast majority of us live quietly in the center and wish the loudmouths, who do NOT represent the majority, would just shut the fuck up. They are not fixing anything with their bullshit and bluster, all they are doing is creating strife and dissent for no good demonstrable reason ... and contrary to what their handlers seem to think, no matter how many times they repeat a lie, it remains a lie. (Note there are many kinds of lie before you clam to not be lying.)
And if you're one of those wing-nut loudmouthed liars, here's something to think about: Do you honestly think that anything you type here in the pages of ElReg means jack shit to anybody, anywhere? Do you really think you are making a difference somehow? Do you really think you are changing anybody's mind about anything? Now be honest with yourself before answering (if you are still capable).
And now ask yourself "Why am I wasting my time with this here on ElReg?".
/rant
I'm off for a pint. All y'all are welcome to join me. Leave your wingnutpolitics outside the pub. Ta.
I'd encourage you to engage with ideas on their own (de)merits, rather than dismissing them because the voice shouting them is loud/angry.
One could argue that being against same-sex relationships is extreme today, but was centrist a few generations ago. The women clamoring for suffrage at the turn of the last century were VERY vocal and in-your face, yet few today would say that they should have just been silent and gone back to their households and let their menfolk drink in peace (and do their voting for them.)
Do you see the problem with dismissing an idea just because the voice spouting it is loud/angry or left/right of a perceived 'center?' I mean there are loud/angry idiots too, but dismiss them because they're idiots. As the examples about show, what is 'center' is a fleeting concept.
Presumably the non-leaders will be encouraged to follow the example they set. So they can change to more inclusive talk about management such as :
My boss is as useless as a fairtrade chocolate teapot.
My boss couldn't organise a tasting at an organic fruit smoothie cooperative.
My boss is as non-verbal as a bag of nail-placing implements.
A knowledge of history is reassuring. It's essentially Puritanism. The Puritans tried to regulate everyone's thought in the late C16th/early C17th. They were followed by the considerably less restrictive late C17th & C18th. Then we had the Victorian values of the mid o late C19th followed by the Edwardian period, flappers and the swinging sixties. We're back in the Puritan phase again but this too will pass and its proponents will be derided just as their predecessors were.
Sorry, I can't tell precisely what you mean because I can't parse which error you made.
I'm not poking fun or being pedantic for the sake of lulz. I honestly can't parse your position.
Are we PEAKING as in reaching the zenith of something?
Or are we peeking INTO something, as in seeing the first signs of something still not fully developed?
Not sure how to FTFY.
I wonder whether anyone has done any research to find out who is actually offended by the use of most of these words and idioms in the context of IT.
Or is it simply an attempt to win the "more woke than thou" stakes? If it is, they've blundered in that blog with "Find a buddy for practice" as "buddy" is derived from "brother " (sexist?).
Apparently the blog post author aims to "solve common pain points". Surely such language is rather offensive to anyone who suffers from chronic pain, and who needs no barbed reminding of the unpleasantness of such?
And, even better, the blog post has the lists of discouraged and suggested terms only as an image, making it literally inaccessible to anyone who is visually impaired or blind. Duh!
Actually, that would be perfectly in line with period usage and norms. It's another example of how living language changes and something that was perfectly correct, respectful, and innocuous changed to something now perceived as negative.
Is not 'mistress' in its current usage a reference to how a female paramour, rather than play the subordinate role normal for spouses at the time, was instead in charge of their life, i.e. their 'mistress' because their needs/whims ruled the actions of the cheating husband?
Therefore, the original comment was wrong, and she would have either had to use the apostrophe to denote that the owner of the room was the mistress of the household, and thus it would indeed be the mistresses' bedroom.
If the original commenter did NOT mean to connote ownership of the room, as in this is the primary bedroom to which (somehow) all other bedrooms are subordinate then 'master bedroom' would be correct even if the primary owner/occupant was female, as English defaults to the male gendering of the word in this case.
...Or Igloodame could be against the gendering of words in modern English, but then one wonders at the point of the correction of the archaic usage in the first place?
Yes, Mistress' bedroom is more precisely what I communicated to the real estate agent. The typical term on this side of the pond is indeed "master bedroom" (not master's bedroom) which is why I originally left out the apostrophe in my comment, and mea culpa as I should know better by now.
And mistress of the household, not extramarital mistress, in case that requires further clarification. As for the basement being a wine cellar or a dungeon... both, yes. It's not actually an igloo, but sadly not a full-sized castle either, so one has to make do.
I gotcha. I was just engaging in counter-pedantry with the person who made the joke over the apostrophe, because the irony was that their correction to make the joke was wrong. If someone's going to be a pedant, then by gosh be RIGHT in your pedantry. Or, you know, leave the grammar police badge off for the day, but where's the fun in that? ;)
Oh dear, I had better not give up the day job. There was no intention to be a pedant, just TRYING to make a link between "ticks" and "fleas in the ear" in the context of people trying to erase ancient aphorisms. But thanks for the clarification anyway. Obviously, whichever way one uses the apostrophe there, one opens up oneself to getting a flea in the ear from a Reg commentard.
But at least Cybersaber thought it was (could be) a joke.
Ah. I didn't get the punny intent. I thought the humor was meant to be in the situation where an accidental addition of a punctuation mark caused a misunderstanding that would result in some very stern words from to whom it may concern. I'm on the West side of the pond, so I didn't get the ticks pun because I'm aware of the usage ticks = checks/lines, but we don't call them ticks and I didn't make a connection to fleas.
I grew up in the Texas backwoods where both are a concern and they're *very* different problems. One causes small bite wounds resulting in irritation and itching, the other results in some very unpleasant/uncomfortable situations when they latch onto certain soft bits with high blood flow. Lyme disease is a concern out here too with ticks too, and ticks don't generally latch on to cartilaginous bits. Not sure fleas would either.
I'm not trying to be a pedant, just sharing why the humor didn't click possibly due to my background and personal experience with both kinds of parasites growing up. :)
This reminds me, many moons ago I was on a webmaster course. As the majority of participants were female, I suggested it should be rebranded webmistress course.
The suggestion was thought interesting if perhaps not giving the wanted image. The majority thought webmoster (Danish for web auntie) was better.
...when I heard a real estate agent referring to a 'primary bedroom' of my home,
Estate agents have always had a language of their own, especialy when describing property. But tell the estate agent that this will be the master's bedroom, that will be the slave's bedroom, and it won't be a wine cellar, it'll be a dungeon. Otherwise they are clearly discriminating against members of the BDSM community.
Also ask them why bathrooms frequently no longer contain their namesake item. It's somewhat misleading to describe a property as 5 bed, 11 bath unless he's expecting people to relax and soak in a WC. This I guess is another one of those wealth divide things. Larger houses still seem to manage a bath tub, smaller ones do not. Guessing this is a way to stop the peasents throwing the baby out with the bath water. Also strange given we're supposedly facing more extreme, prolonged droughts, yet reducing people's ability to store water in 'climate' emergencies.
"Also ask them why bathrooms frequently no longer contain their namesake item. It's somewhat misleading to describe a property as 5 bed, 11 bath unless he's expecting people to relax and soak in a WC."
Here in CA, that property might be listed as 5 bed, 6 and 5 half baths (WTF is a half bath?). Or 6 full, 4 half and a powder room (downstairs guest toilet+sink). Or 4 full, 2 shower only, 4 half and a powder room. Or any other way to describe the rooms without actually saying "toilet".
Realtors are weird. Ever seen how badly they dress up an empty house? I'd rather see it empty ...
Here in Switzerland, properties are referred to as having "X" or "X.5" number of rooms, but kitchen / living / dining area is considered together to be one room (or 1.5 if it's a large open plan), and bathrooms are not counted at all. A large hallway or landing could also be counted as 0.5 rooms. And (especially) in bigger cities with older buildings where the kitchen is a separate room it's counted as 1 extra room.
So a 3-bedroom house with a large open plan living room / kitchen, 2 large bathrooms including baths and showers, and a guest toilet could be described as 4.5 rooms. A small apartment with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom with just a shower and no bath and a small kitchen separate from the living/dining room might also get described as 4.5 rooms.
"Ever seen how badly they dress up an empty house?"
It's also stunning how incapable they are of photographing a property to give any sort of sense of what it looks / feels like.
Or 6 full, 4 half and a powder room (downstairs guest toilet+sink).
Yeh, that one confuses me. Should I be informing the DEA, or the ATF? Or when I ask them if there's a room for a magazine, they start wibbling about shelves, and racks. But any foo.. I mean person knows that racks go in the server room. If we can still call them that.
Realtors are weird. Ever seen how badly they dress up an empty house? I'd rather see it empty ...
Yep. I'd rather see the as-builts, but I guess we're lucky that floor plans are included in a lot of property details. Even if the principles of inclusivity end up meaning standard units like feet get to be redefined to whatever those feet want to be.
No, they tried to cash in on 'current thing' by using an insulting parody of a woman and it backfired. Dylan Mulvaney is as trans as Lilly Savage or Dame Edna.
For decades women have been fighting for equal rights and against gender stereotypes and now they seem to be willingly bending the knee to misogyny and taking second place behind the very force they had tried to overcome. "I am a better woman than a real woman because I am stunning and brave".
Even scarier is that after decades of being told 'don't enforce gender stereotypes on your kids' we are now in a situation where if a little boy plays with a barbie or a girl plays with a truck they are declared trans. We've come full circle, only 'girls' can dress in pink and play with dolls and only 'boys' can play with toy trucks and dress in blue. What happened to gender neutrality and gender equality? It has evaporated.
Oh most likely the threats came from the radical left. That is their usual tactic. There is no law that says you cannot criticise and people are free to vote with their feet and drink some other barely alcoholic watered down piss. The left is always calling for boycotts. The right dares to do similar and the left freaks out. How many people and businesses have the left tried to cancel as they failed to follow the mandated narrative?
Normal people see Dylan for what they are, a grifter riding the wave of 'current thing' and being a major attention whore. Would you say Blaire White is trans?
Dylan is hurting the trans movement along with the TRAs who silence and attack women. Nothing says tolerance and inclusion like a grown man hitting a woman. I'd always been told that is a bad thing to do. As I said before we are erasing decades of work to remove stereotypes and are now trying to actively enforce them.
It seems like you're making the common proposition where you're trying to conflate something you like, or something you want to be, with an immutable physical truth. That's a false equivalence. The physical anatomical body I was born into, that's a physical truth. Whether it is right or allowed that means I can act like a male, a female, an alien, or a stapler is an opinion.
Is your opinion 'right'? Is mine 'wrong'? Well that's an ideological matter, and if you demean those that disagree with you, you're being dishonest with yourself if you object to them behaving in demeaning ways toward you. If one wants to play 'impose my idea of what identities are allowed' on me, then one should stop complaining if I do it to them.
Make no mistake, the LBGTIQ+-@$!$%%# crowd are drawing lines around identities that are allowed an not. They're just drawing different lines based on different moral principles. Arguing if they're using the right principles to draw those lines is just another religious/ideological argument - it's still saying, for instance 'Trans is OK, child molestation is not, and there are no staplersexuals. Probably. Nevermind, I don't want to know.'
A Christian fundamentalist like me might draw a much smaller circle. They each believe they are 'right' according to either the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the God of Me, Myself, and I <List of possible deities/moral authorities not exhaustive. Fill in your own.> Both should realize they're drawing circles and the only difference is in what moral code they base all their 'you should...' statements on.
These arguments really should be condensed to: Do you subscribe to The Church of the Flying Sphagetti Monster? No? Well, we're not going to agree on this one then. No need to call you names. Hope you someday See the Meatball and Join the Pasta, brother/sister! May your linguine always be fresh!
Having said that... I think that I am a stapler. A staplersexual stapler. A red one. Deal with it, or I'll burn your business down. (That's a joke and an Office Space reference to try to soften the tone, not a real threat in case any moderators are reading.)
Please go away - but to where? Suspend to storage? Transfer to another cluster?
We use the strength of idioms to convey rich meaning in few words.
Kill
Because we are anthropomorphizing (sort of) a computer process (which is included by reference to something you can only do to something alive in the first place.) then 'kill' brings in the rich meanings of:
Yes, we do want it to 'go away' (which is itself a euphemism)
We also want it to cease to exist anywhere.
And not in a gentle way, we want it to violently stop, NOW.
All that rich meaning is fairly unambiguously summed up in 4 letters. Please-go-away doesn't do half the work, and is many more letters.
That is, until some precious person feels that we should be inclusive and we should INCLUDE that process instead of making it feel unwelcome, so we should deprecate please-go-away.
Edit to add: Yes, I know that the -9 switch means die now, but that's rather esoteric detail non-penguin herders might miss. ;)
Don't these people have anything better to do??? And do they actually achieve anything other than making themselves look stupid and irritating everyone else?
Needless to say, I won't be adhering to those suggestions, not least because scones - it rhymes with drones where I come from - are far too yummy to waste on birds!
Don't these people have anything better to do??? And do they actually achieve anything other than making themselves look stupid and irritating everyone else?
Nope. They're just following orders and doing the jobs they were hired for. ESG has been a real goldmine for creating employment opportunities for the otherwise unemployable, and giving them the chance to pay off their student debt from getting degrees that would otherwise be worthless. That this increases overheads and reduces productivity and competitiveness is a small price to pay.
* The Politically-Correct English Language Inquisitiors, ignorant of historical Engish usage as they are, presume English words and phrases mean only what they think they mean, and that any other interpretations are heresy. HERESY!
* English words and phrases can have multiple meanings, and the Inquisitors presume any usage of a term with multiple meanings was done with the worst of all possible intents.
* Some, perhaps many, technical terms are stupid and misleading. A master/slave relationship, when used in computer terminology, should mean a controller/controllee relationship, which is why I've always disliked the master/slave terms applied to IDE drives. AFAIK, the "slave" drive does not carry out any commands from the "master" drive. "Master caution light" is another poor choice; it does not command anything. Rather, the master caution light's input is the ORed outputs to all the other caution lights. Yet removing gender references from connector types is silly, because the analogy is instantly obvious ("male connector", "female connector", and "hermaphroditic connector"), and because there is no apt replacement.
* Some English phrases I learned as a child appalled me even then. "I'm free, white, and twenty-one."; "Do it like a white man."; "I had him over a barrel"; and, "I tore him a new asshole." (the last two connotating homosexual rape).
(Icon for the Politically-Correct English Language Inquisitors)
Fuck that. Deal with the Recycling Bin first. My house has a separate bin for each type of recycling, but Windows only has one. What are they teaching our kids? It's time we had a blue bin for Word files, a green one for Excel, red for PDFs, yellow for Zip files etc etc.
We can't keep going on with just one recycling bin, Microsoft needs to get with the times...we need to be more conscientious with our deleted files.
Think about it, how many of our files just go to digital landfill when they could be diverted to people in need. Think of the people in Africa we could save if we sent them our spam back so they can re-use it.
I've been recycling spam for years now and my mailbox only accepts 100% recycled fairtrade spam. Everyone else here should do the same.
If we don't recycle and reuse spam, that nice West African Prince might run out. What's he going to do then?
All of us are too busy worrying about our grannies being scammed, while he's out there, typing millions of emails a day. Ask yourself, who is the real villain here, your useless granny watching countdown drinking tea and eating biscuits or the hard working Nigerian Royals pumping out billions of emails just to get their money out of the country so they can flee a warzone? Eh? Who? I ask you!
"The lack of recent posts was attributed to the initiative having succeeded. "I think it's reasonable to declare victory and move on," was one response."
Would that other activists do the same when they've won their battles. However activism has now become a career choice for many, including the juicy juicy dollars for organising and participating in conferences all over the world.
Don't get me wrong, activism is very important. But as soon as a person sees themselves as bigger than the cause, it's a problem. And there's only so many causes one can focus on
Seems the drive to diversity started in Silicon Valley in the 90s. I was working for another tech giant which brought in a woman CEO, and the company saw her hire only females in senior executive positions, and she got rid of the males in those senior positions.
Then I joined Cisco, where a "Black Employees Network" was forming. HR would lecture us on diversity and inclusion, and one of the employees asked HR in a public forum if he could start a "White Employees Network" (he was Asian, neither black nor white). The HR lady was speechless!
Now companies also have to deal with LGBTQ and the ramifications that brings. More fun!
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