That too. 
One thing that baffled me, and still does, was the scene in Jurassic Park where the lass looks at a full-screen-graphics display of a fly-through of something – just a bunch of moving colored outlines – and declared, “This is UNIX!” There was no obvious clue that would have identified the type of OS, the only thing I could imagine is that, peripherally, she saw a 3-button mouse and/or a particular keyboard layout, but the impression given was that she made the determination by looking at the display. It made no sense.
Not true. I saw Jurassic Park on opening night with some friends, including one who is an excellent programmer. When that scene came up, he looked at the screen and said to me “that’s Unix” just a few seconds before the girl on screen said it.
I asked him about it some time later and he said the giveaway was the directory names in the interface, “/bin”, “/etc”, “/home” and things like that. Classic Unix. Maybe you can’t make out the names when it’s shows on television, but on a theater screen they were visible.
It is 3D file system program fsn on UNIX-based IRIX.
My mom was in a college class with an earnest young woman who was going on about how important Evelyn Waugh’s female perspective was. :o
Yesterday I heard a radio interview about the NC Gov’s proposal to float a multimillion$ bond issue for mostly education infrastructure and the PhD president of a community college referred at least twice to a “criteria”. Arrgghh. One is a criterion. More than one are criteria.
TIME magazine listed Evelyn Waugh as one of the greatest female writers.
I saw a TV series about a young American woman who was going to school in England. She stopped introducing herself with “Hi, I’m Randy” after people would snigger every time she did it.
That is chump change compared to the run of a college catalog we printed a number of years ago. Imagine looking at tens of thousands of these enticements for higher education with a teaser at the top that said, “Finding Your Nitch”.
The 3D objects in the silly graphical interface all had filenames attached to them (mostly, directory names, actually). It’s not implausible that some of those directory names were things like /usr/local or /etc/bin which would be distinctively recognizable as Unix.
Or, of course, she might have happened to have had the same silly graphical interface (which did actually exist) installed on her own computer at home.
I once heard of a Czech girl who loved going to the theatre. So she told her British boyfriend she was a real “goer.” 
The different rank titles in different services seems to have been custom made for confusion. It’s too bad the Navy* can’t use a different title for the rank of naval captain. “Commodore” suggests itself since that rank no longer exists, strictly speaking. However, the term is still used as a courtesy title in certain circumstances, so that wouldn’t work too well.
*Or navies, I should say. I understand this differentiation between Captains in the Navy and those in the other services is standard practice in all the NATO forces and pretty much the rest of the world as well.
The different rank titles in different services seems to have been custom made for confusion. IIRC the naval rank of Captain is equivalent to that of Colonel in the ground forces and thereby even higher than Major.
I know that - but I’m not sure the authors do!
No, the authors know that, because that’s how she’s first introduced. Or at least, some of the authors know that: With as many different co-authors as that series has, who knows what all of them know?
I once read a blog of a young student named Deb who was studying in Japan. English-Language words tend to get “Japanified” by native speakers; this often includes appending a vowel sound after the final syllable, so (for example) “ice cream” becomes “aisu kurimu.” In keeping with this practice, native Japanese folks pronounced her name as “Debu,” which happens to be Japanese slang meaning roughly “fatso”.
I had an uncle who worked in the concrete biz almost his whole life. One of his biggest projects was a large Interstate highway bridge. he was the pour supervisor for it. What else would you call him? The place supervisor?
(He also arranged for the 2nd driveway at our house when I was a kid. Nice range there.)
“Pour” was the word he used. Never heard “place”.
Now, if you wanted to nitpick about “cement” being used where “concrete” is the right term, okay then.
We actually alleviate it by using “Navy” in reference - Lt(N) or Capt(N), and you say it like that too “Lieutenant-Navy”
When people refer to “Andrew Lloyd Webber” as “Webber.” His last name is “Lloyd Webber” dammit.
This is true, but there are ways to eliminate the shutter sound.
But…how are we supposed to know this? This is the first time I’ve ever heard a reference to it.
(Sumbitch oughta use a hyphen.)
That is a good point. It’s not exactly easy to determine whether someone with three names has a two-part surname or is using their middle name, unless it’s indicated with punctuation or we’re actually TOLD about it.