Muse back!
February 06, 2006 / Monday
Some Words Should Not Be Abbreviated
I just finished reading a chapter on design and code reviews for class tomorrow. In that chapter was a little section on defect injection and removal. In that little section was a table. In that table were column headers that read "Cum Injected" and "Cum Removed".
How did that get past the editors?
It reminded me of a user on a past project who wanted me to generate a table with a column titled "Cum Yield". After several double takes at his e-mail, I realized he was talking about cumulative yield, and had quite innocently suggested "Cum Yield" to save real estate. I made sure to leave enough room for several full spellings of "cumulative" in the header.
I suppose I could have titled the column as requested, but I wouldn't have been able to talk about the app (or to that user, for that matter) with a straight face after that.
Comments
um, yeah, good job changing the header! but i can't believe the same kinda thing made it into a serious book. good grief.
Posted by: heather at February 7, 2006 07:38 AM
Reminds me of my Chinese statistics prof who had no idea why people were laughing when he asked over and over, "If I flip a coin, what are the chances that I will get head and what are the chances that I will get tail?" Homo or hetero, I say 50%.
Posted by: url54 at February 7, 2006 11:30 AM
At a company I used to work for, the code had a variable that was supposed to count the number of buttons on a page. The variable name: "NumButts". That one had me giggling for a long time.
Posted by: Rat at February 7, 2006 02:49 PM
reminds me of when Alan Cumming was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (mmmmmmmmm, smexxxah!) and he said he was coming out with a fragrance called, quite simply, "Cumming". nice.
Posted by: cheddah j at February 7, 2006 03:07 PM
I was looking over some electrical drawings the other day, and saw several instances of "Anal In", "Anal Out" and some other anal references. Apparently analog inputs/outputs needed to be funnier.
Posted by: Mike at February 7, 2006 05:52 PM
oh lordy lordy i'm laughing my ass off -- UNBELIEVABLE!! yeah, how DID that get past the frickin editors??? esheesh..
but i have to say, scrolling through the previous commenters, i cracked up AGAIN at "url54"'s story about his Chinese stats prof's question.
wow, two funnies in a row!
viv your blog ROCKS SO HARD
Posted by: amy at February 8, 2006 01:55 PM
A conference brochure I got recently had a good one: PMS. There was "About PMS", the "6th Annual PMS conference" and, my favorite, "The History of PMS." Uhm, editor, anyone?
Posted by: Anonymous at February 9, 2006 11:02 AM
reminds me of when Alan Cumming was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (mmmmmmmmm, smexxxah!) and he said he was coming out with a fragrance called, quite simply, "Cumming"
That wasn't a joke - you really can buy this stuff: http://www.cummingthefragrance.com
The commercial is either hilarious or disturbing. Not sure which.
Posted by: Anonymous at February 9, 2006 08:51 PM
Oh.
Mah.
Gah.
Posted by: pat at February 14, 2006 09:19 PM