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Caught up in the rat race, and feeling like a no one
At work, I am currently reviewing a big pile of technical documentation. Largely because no one understands it. Except the guy who wrote it, who understands it perfectly and doesn't see what the fuss is about. So I am reading, asking him questions, re-writing, asking him more questions, trying to explain to someone else, realising I don't understand at all, rinse, repeat. Everything he's written is correct, it just needs a lot more explanation and examples adding.
The writer's first language is German and, while he speaks (and writes) excellent English, he does occasionally use words in a way a native speaker wouldn't. In particular, several of us have been thrown by his describing certain objects as "contenders".
Contenders for what? we ask.
It turns out that in some cases, we might end up with conflicting objects. These objects are in contention. And a thing that's in contention? That's a contender.
Which intrigues me. A contender - one who contends - clearly is in contention. I can't fault the logic. However, I don't think that's a usage of contender which comes naturally in English.
Would any of you use contender in that way? I'm particularly interested to hear from people who might be writing (or reading) technical docs relating to things in contention :)
(I've changed it, since it confused at least three people here. I've gone for the rather more verbose "object with a conflicting ID".)
In any case, the net effect is that I have been singing Heavyweight Champion of the World on and off for two days. Which is slightly more fortunate than another colleague, who immediately associated it with Gladiators instead :)
The writer's first language is German and, while he speaks (and writes) excellent English, he does occasionally use words in a way a native speaker wouldn't. In particular, several of us have been thrown by his describing certain objects as "contenders".
Contenders for what? we ask.
It turns out that in some cases, we might end up with conflicting objects. These objects are in contention. And a thing that's in contention? That's a contender.
Which intrigues me. A contender - one who contends - clearly is in contention. I can't fault the logic. However, I don't think that's a usage of contender which comes naturally in English.
Would any of you use contender in that way? I'm particularly interested to hear from people who might be writing (or reading) technical docs relating to things in contention :)
(I've changed it, since it confused at least three people here. I've gone for the rather more verbose "object with a conflicting ID".)
In any case, the net effect is that I have been singing Heavyweight Champion of the World on and off for two days. Which is slightly more fortunate than another colleague, who immediately associated it with Gladiators instead :)
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However, apparently I'm supposed to go for clarity, not for fun :(
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Though I do like it. Maybe I'll work on spreading that usage ;-).
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(I say almost, because Twain's advice to 'break any rule rather than say anything outright barbarous' applies in All Circumstances :) )
In general, the aim when editing bad technical writing should be to end up with something a lot shorter that contains more and better information :)
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Examples are a Good Plan, especially if you make them relevant to what people will actually try to do with the tech, rather than just what it does. Am I alone in finding example-writing oddly fun?
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Example code is often a faff, though, because you have to write so much which isn't strictly relevant in order to provide a context for the thing that you actually want to demonstate. (Assuming you need stuff which can be compiled and run, rather than just illustrative snippets.)
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The example for 'how to make a set of decision tables rather than one humungous table' was a bit tedious, though, I'll confess :)
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See also: documentation, words which probably shouldn't appear in
:)
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(As part of electronicifying my library, I've just bought OED's iPad dictionary/thesaurus. I haven't yet decided whether I'll also be keeping my paper Shorter OED. The paper version has more definitions of "contend" than the iPad version, but it's easier to find words in the latter. Hmmmm.)
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One colleague loves the word "timely" and just can't get using it correctly. Another has the as is/as such problem. "Since ten years" is pretty common as well.
The documents I hate reading are the ones written by a German former colleague who had a very good vocabulary and was also a show off. They have mistakes I have plenty of sympathy for but are also completely unreadable when they are correct :-)
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There are almost certainly plenty of those in our office. I just don't have to review them :-)
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The one I see a lot of atm in similar "parts of speech a native wouldn't get to" vein is "edition", meaning "the act of editing".
There seems to be an increasing issue where spellcheckers let a word through, but it doesn't quite mean what it might.
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I remember being very distressed as a child to realise that there were some words in English that didn't exist. If one displays precocity, one is precocious. If one displays temerity, one is...
Temerous isn't a word. And when I tried to find out what the correct adjective was, my mother coolly informed me that there wasn't one. My logical brain was horrified at this omission :)
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'Timorous' suffers from its stem noun, 'timor', being lost to archaism.
'Temerity' suffers from being directly imported from French without its stem having ever been present in English afaik :-)
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It returned from her tutor with some fairly terse comments about the problems of allowing horses to run the show...
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(We don't need no emulation, we don't need no source control...)
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