Word Count
Writers Talk About Writing
You Say To-MAH-to: Everyday Shibboleths
September 28, 2015
By Mike Pope
contributorMike Pope![]() Word CountWriters Talk About WritingYou Say To-MAH-to: Everyday Shibboleths September 28, 2015 By Mike Pope![]() Word CountWriters Talk About WritingThis Is Not the CRUD You're Looking For: Odd Programming Jargon May 20, 2015 By Mike Pope
I was reading a document at work once and ran across this statement: "Core contracts within the product are interface-based and are easily mockable." My programmer-to-English translation filter was momentarily confused, and for a brief but amusing moment I thought, "You mean, we can laugh at them?"
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Last August, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries published a list of words that they were adding to their dictionaries. Among them was neckbeard, which is listed as "A growth of hair on a man's neck." But this self-describing definition is not why the term was added. More interestingly, the term connotes someone with "poor grooming habits" and who's "socially inept."
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I occasionally teach a class about using Microsoft Word. In one of the class exercises, students are asked to format a page, and the instructions tell them to "outdent" a heading. After I got several questions about that each class, I realized that lots of people have no idea what the term means.
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Word CountWriters Talk About WritingHeavy Lifting and Shaving Yaks: Corporate Lingo October 22, 2014 By Mike Pope
Anyone who works for a large organization (or maybe even a small one) knows that certain phrases grab people's imagination and spread through the organization. If you're like me, you go to meetings and presentations and expressions keep popping up, which is very distracting — you try to listen to what the speaker is saying, but you end up paying more attention to how they're saying it.
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Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingFor Your Eyes Only: Terms from Crypto July 21, 2014 By Mike Pope
When you visit your bank's website or enter a credit-card number, you've probably noticed that in the browser's address box, the URL begins with https. The "S" stands for "secure," and the security technology your browser uses for that "S" represents one of the great inventions in the history of secrets. In this piece I'll walk you through some of the terms of that rich field.
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Article Topics:Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About LanguageHistory in the Toolbox: The Vocabulary of Electrical Units May 21, 2014 By Mike Pope
I am guessing that the average electrician doesn't realize how much history is knocking about in his or her toolbox. Volt, amp, ohm, watt—these electrical units are all eponyms, derived from the names of pioneers in the field. Let's have a tour.
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