Comments | brinian: more randomness

brinian

more randomness - words

Mar 23, 2007 12:38

Be careful how you use them!

Whenever someone talks about how they "service" a client rather than "serve" them or "provide service to" them, I get rather graphic images of stud service. Not good. The farm kid in me has some rather good visuals! As I recalled, "service" is a noun rather than a verb, but my OCD side did have to go check the ( Read more... )

random

Comments 7

nosemovie March 23 2007, 20:38:54 UTC

Those are classic!

Working here I always get calls where folks want to cancel their "prescription."

uhhh, maybe you should keep the prescription and just cancel your paper... sigh.

brucix March 23 2007, 22:02:09 UTC

Me fail english? That's unpossible!

pc123 March 23 2007, 23:15:14 UTC

<> Now I'VE got a visual of a mob of homeless people with Stigmatas trying to service each other;)

brinian March 24 2007, 02:10:40 UTC

Glad I could help ;-p

intertext March 24 2007, 13:41:11 UTC

Hahaha. Those are great! As you can imagine, as an English teacher, I see more than my share of howlers - one of my favourites was a student essay in which the heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper" was described as suffering from "post paradigm" depression instead of post partum depression - my colleagues and I thought it sounded as if she'd been reading too much critical theory!

brinian March 26 2007, 17:48:22 UTC

"Howlers"...all I could think of was the kind of 'howler' in the Harry Potter books. "Post paradigm" depression sounds like something I've had while working in high tech...the feeling you get after you've spent five days in training to re-indoctrinate you in the 'new and improved' corporate culture or some other such bulls&*t.

anonymous March 26 2007, 02:46:40 UTC

I once worked for a company that "certificated" their products instead of certifying them. Drove me freakin' crazy when we got near the end of the development cycle and more and more talk turned to how the certificating was going.

Later I worked for another company that believed "architect" was a verb. With that company, the beginning of the development cycle when we were busy "architecting the solution" was the painful part.

Does bleeding from the eyeballs count for stigmata? If so, I probably qualified while I worked for those companies (both Fortune 20, btw). Otherwise, well, there was kind of a stigma attached to being a person who twitched violently when major corporate buzzwords were used.