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Today a colleague thanked me for helping him:

“Here in Brazil when somebody does stuffs really quick and help us we say: YOU ARE THE GUY!.. don’t know if that means something…”

I laughed for a moment, but I’m not even sure where this got lost in translation. Did our phrase get translated to Portuguese wrong originally? Does Portuguese have two words equivalent to “man” and “guy” even? Or perhaps he just chose “guy” when he translated it back for me. But those possibilities betray our pretentious ethnocentricity, I think. Perhaps it was a perfect translation of a Portuguese idiom unrelated to ours, or perhaps our idiom derives from theirs; in any case, “you’re the man” is not intrinsically more sensible than “you’re the guy”.

Completely reasonable mistranslations illuminate the silly subtleties of English; as I work with more of our overseas friends in a language of obscure minutiae, where “you’re the man” means something completely different than “you’re The Man”, I can look forward to even more moments of confusion knowing precisely the words being said but not the meaning intended. Now I’m even more curious what an Indian colleague means when he says “people are dancing on my head”.

And yes, my punctuation is outside of my quotes, because Lynne Truss says it’s okay.

Dr. Neumann, on networking interrupts:

“This is just what we do in class when we raise our hands: we’re making an asynchronous, out-of-band service request to arbitrate the communication channel with frequency-division multiplexing.”

And it was a useful analogy, because it made perfect sense. That seems to be the difference between geek-speak and corporate-speak, because I just got a memo about integrating and aligning sector requirements with competency trends and strategic plans as part of a multi-pronged approach to enable client affinity, and I have no clue what that means.

Ever have a terrible instructor and later find out that you actually learned quite a lot from him? Things come back more easily than you might expect, but I still wouldn’t want that experience again – the grad version is excellent. (caution: inside jokes.)

Anyway, it’s time for some irreverent comments from Panko’s Business Data Networks and Telecommunications book (not that I’m procrastinating):

On battles over standards between the IETF, ISO, and ITU-T: In 1992, IETF member Dave Clark summarized the situation this way: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

On acronyms: OSI is the ‘Reference Model of Open Systems Interconnection’ … in any case, OSI is rarely spelled out, which is merciful.

But having started on acronyms, I have to mention my favorite, as documented by Mike Cowlishaw in the IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary: GOCB. Here’s how it breaks down:
G: GTMOSI (General Teleprocessing Monitor for OSI – two levels)
O: OSD (OSI Session Driver – three levels!)
C: Control
B: Block
This yields: General Teleprocessing Monitor for Open Systems Interconnection Open Systems Interconnection Session Driver Control Block (and that’s being easy and leaving out the Reference Model part). But that was obvious, right?

I’m back, and I’ve finally set up Gallery. Here are three weeks of my life in photos:

Boulder
New York
Washington, D.C.

Enjoy!

The U of A invited us to take a survey about our opinions on how tuition money should be allocated.

Question 5: What financial resources you use for attending the university include? (check all that apply)

Well, apparently someone should use the Writing Skills Improvement Program resource more often.

But it’s okay, because we have a brilliant plan to fix this problem: House Concurrent Resolution 2036, which would amend the Constitution of Arizona and establish English as the official language. “Representatives of the state or a local government would be required to preserve, protect and enhance the role of English as the official language.” The text of the proposed amendment begins:

“Whereas, the United States is comprised of individuals from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds … ”

American Heritage Dictionary says:

Usage Note: The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or constitute or make up) the Union.

Sure, maybe it’s picky to want them to use “comprise” correctly, but if one of the stated goals is preserving English, that wasn’t the best first step. And don’t get me started on the questionable agreement in the description or the missing serial comma.

Anyway, go off tomorrow and vote to add grammatical errors to our Constitution if you like. I have a suspicion that we won’t see a radical resurgence of well-written surveys. In fact, we won’t see much of anything different.