Spin-In

[Mark A Mandel]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, James A. Landau wrote:


#"...bafflegab from the malarkey machine at Cisco Systems Inc."  I
#don't recall ever having seen "bafflegab" before.  New coining?

No, I've known it for years. Can't give a time or place, though.

#"Cisco...was all torqued out of shape because we had shown..."---the
#usual version is "all bent out of shape".
#
#"Torqued" implies that someone or something external to Cisco had
#applied a torque wrench to the company, which is not what Byron is
#saying.  Instead he is saying that Cisco is self-bent/torqued as a
#suspiciously out-of-proportion reaction to a previous column.

I've often heard "torqued" = 'upset', quite possibly originating as a
twist (sorry!) on "bent out of shape" although I'd never thought of that
connection before.

#"top corporate underlings"---oxymoron?

Not at all. They're the highest ones who aren't on top. Or, depending on
how you intepret "underlings", they're the highest (toadies / assistants
/ ... ), or the (...) to the real top people.

#"set up like some kind of Defense Department skunk works in the
#apparent hope that no one would notice what was going on."  This is a
#misuse of "skunk works" which means not a secret operation but rather
#one in which a team is given a tough target, no supervision, and a
#mandate to do whatever is necessary.  The original (real) "Skonk
#Works" was the team at Lockheed that produced, among other things, the
#U-2 (the airplane, not the music group).  A skunk works is secret only
#if it is working on classified projects.

In the tech industry -- at least as I heard it therein -- the term could
be applied to an unofficial project, not approved by the appropriate
upper management* but started up anyway and tucked into odd corners of
time, space, storage, billing, etc. Sometimes these prove successful and
are adopted officially.

* Not "not approved OF". The top may know unofficially that it's going
on, but the essence of it is that it hasn't been through the official
blessing process.

#"In Hebrew folk wisdom, a half-truth is said to be a whole lie"---I
#have not heard this one before.

I have; again, no cites. Shall I ask at shul? It may actually have a
specific traditional attribution; a heck of a lot of our folk wisdom is
in writing!

-- Mark A. Mandel