Urm, Canon is pronounced ‘cannon’ is it not? It is in the UK anyway. Spelling it, of course, is a different matter…
I work in graphic design, and I sometimes get requests to “crop this part out of the page.”
I can CLEAR it out. If I CROP it out, it’ll be the only thing left.
Even some of my fellow editors get it wrong sometimes. “I need this in Adobe format.” Uh, WHICH Adobe? There’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and the first two have many different file types to boot.
Heeeee. I love it. Incredibly, as of this spring, there are 32 knock-off Steadicams being made worldwide. From the cheesy and dangerous to the extremely high-end and professional.
What did the C.P. demo person have to say to the big boss’s statement?
Yep.
Here are more dead giveaways that an engineer or technician doesn’t know what they hell they’re talking about:
They use “Centigrade” instead of “Celsius.”
They say “weight” when they’re referring to mass.
They say “velocity” when they’re referring to speed.
They say “power” when they mean voltage, and vice-versa.
They say “RMS power” when they should really say RMS voltage or RMS current.
They have no clue what “calibration” or “traceability” really means.
I’ll bet you loved watching TV shows where some character says they’ll get a major print job out overnight just by “paying the rush charges.”
[minor nitpick] I work in the film and t.v. business. There has not been a single Lighting Director, Director of Photography or Gaffer whom I have ever heard say, " the light’s fading, we’re metering at 6200 Kelvins". It simply is not said. Ever.
Tungsten light is usually rated at 3200 degrees Kelvin. Similarly, fluorescent ( cool whites ) are rated at 4200 degrees Kelvin, and North American daylight at mid-day on a cloudless day is rated at 5600 degrees Kelvin.
While I believe you, I must say that the color temperature of light is also measured in Kelvin, but not in Kelvins. Always in “Degrees Kelvin”. Interestingly enough, that is so much the accepted nomenclature that if a DP were to say, " this lamp must be losing it’s color, it’s warming down from 3200 Kelvins to 2900 Kelvins, let’s swap it out", in our business people would in fact think that that DP had no idea what he/she was talking about.
[/minor nitpick]
Incidentally, the rationale for saying “Kelvins” instead of “degrees Kelvin” is that Kelvins are used for absolute measurement of temperature (starting from zero, just like metres or kilograms), not a scale, like Celsius or Fahrenheit; so they are units, not degrees.
Of course, pretty much everyone calls them “degrees Kelvin” by analogy to “degrees Celcius” anyway.
Gah. Yes, I know how to spell Celsius. (I even did it right the first time!)
I work for a porn site. It’s a guarantee that the first thing people think of is definitely not what goes on.
The second thing also doesn’t, but the third thing does.
Cartooniverse
Very awkward indeed. He’s trying to sell us a $40,00 piece of hardware so he tried not to make the boss look like a schmuck. But eventually he asked about who he’d been talking to and he’d sure like to see their Steadicam.
The third thing would be…researching competitors sites?
A friend of mine has on the wall of his office a letter from a then recent Stanford graduate applying for a job as a systems analysis. :wally
I say: "Here’s the “scoop” and “Stop the presses” all the time. I’ve also used the word “flack”. There’s something fun and ironic about using “old-timey” phrases. I’m in public relations and also do a lot of free-lance writing. I hope people aren’t laughing at me behind my back…
“Hey, I’ve got this screenplay I’ve been working on…”
It’s a little known fact that every single man, woman and child in America is working on a screenplay.
That explains why my 13 year-old daughter already has an agent. :smack:
What about delusions?
How about the people who tell you to “log in to my Web site”? Nine times out of ten, the site they’re talking about doesn’t require registration or login.
In the book trade, people talk about the “bar code number” on a book. That’s almost certainly not what they meant, and it’s ambiguous anyway. Do they mean the Bookland EAN that’s on the inside front cover of mass-market paperbacks and some kids books and the back cover of most other books? Or the UPC that’s on the back cover of any book sold in grocery stores and drug stores? And they probably don’t mean either one of those numbers. Most of the time, they’re talking about the ISBN, which isn’t in either barcode (although it can be quickly derived from the EAN barcode if you know how).
You need to learn your own field! Virtually everyone I worked with in the minicomputer field in the late 1970s and early 1980s used that term. It doesn’t refer to just any hard drive, by the way. It’s specifically a non-removable disk.
Watch too much TV? No, they just remember their own experiences in real, live hospitals. When my children were born 12 and 18 years ago, both of the hospitals had nurseries just like the ones on TV. The moms were regularly given an opportunity to rest as the little ones were taken into a big climate-controlled room with a big window, and folks stood in the hallway outside the window and looked at them.
If I ask what airfoil someone used, and they say NACA 0012 as nack-uh zero zero one two I know they are a manager or somesuch with little or no aerospace engineering experience. It’s N. A. C. A. double oh twelve. Since people pronounce NASA as a single word, they assume that the predicessor was pronouced as a single word as well.
My wife works for one of the Big Four consulting firms. When she was a Sr. Manager, she went to a presentation they were giving to AOL. She told the partner leading the presentation no less than 10 times on the way to the meeting that it was, “America Online,” not, “American Online.” He still pronounced it wrong in the meeting, in front of the potential client.
Which reminds me of the pitch she went to (while with the same firm) at UPS Corporate headquarters. Present in the meeting were the CFO, VP of Tax, and a couple of other fairly senior UPS people. At the end of the meeting, the Partner, referring to the forthcoming engagement letter said, “We’ll FedEx it to you early next week.” Silence around the table, until the CFO finally said, “Umm, you might want to send it UPS.” It still took the partner a couple of minutes to realize what he had said.
Damn, I’m an old fart.
I use this a lot to distinguish block-based storage vs. Network based storage, ie: SCSI or SAN vs. NAS. I’m going to have to come up with new terms, I guess, when iSCSI finally matures.
I also use the term “spindles” to distinguish between a physical disk & a logical disk conglomeration thingee (a LUN).