Monday, April 09, 2007

Speling - its important

I'm an English pedant. It annoys me when I read stuff that contains spelling, grammatical, or even punctuation mistakes. Here is an article about proper punctuation, and here is one about grammatical mistakes. The second one contains all kinds of things that annoy me: "would of" instead of "would have", "your" instead of "you're", and "it's instead of its" ("it's" is short for "it is" &mdash it's as simple as that).

A former boss of mine, Ed, used to say "irre-dis-regardless" instead of "regardless". He was a very clever and funny guy, so I am quite sure he was kidding around, and didn't actually believe that was a real word. We had a tool called "FIST", which was short for "FIle STorage", and one of my co-workers joked about the fact that "fist" sounded similar to the Polish word for (I think) potato. Ed, who was of Spanish descent, thought for a second and then told us that the closest you'd get in Spanish is "There was a bug but I fist it". (Say that quote with a strong Speedy Gonzalez accent to get the full effect.)

Now that I think about it, the FIST tool was the source of another joke. FIST had both a client component ("front-end") and a server component ("back-end"). One of our co-workers was in charge of the server component, and one day when he was working from home, someone asked where he was; the answer was that he was at home, doing the back-end FIST thing. Purely unintentional, but we all laughed for hours.

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