More stones to un-turn

[Chris F Waigl]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: More stones to un-turn
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 11:44 AM -0400 8/6/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
>> At 8/6/2007 11:30 AM, Scot LaFaive wrote:
>>
>>> "Well Halpern believes there is more to come for the Simpsons. More stone to
>>> un-turn in the areas of astronomy, robots, and physics. He even expects
>>> movie sequels."
>>>
>> I can understand unturning a stone that when
>> turned over had revealed a scandal, crime,
>> etc.  But what in the Simpsons about astronomy,
>> robots, and physics fits that interpretation?  (I have not seen the movie.)
>>
>> Joel
>>
>
> Sounds like a pleonastic/redundant un-verb to me
> (a la unpeel the orange, unworm the puppy, unthaw
> the frozen squid, unloose the dogs of war).  I
> don't sense a true reversative here.
>
> LH
>
>

This reminds me on an item on my to-be-blogged list: _unflipping_ . No,
not as an euphemism.

The background is the web-based software system I work with. During
maintenance periods the access for users is disabled by redirecting the
login page to a static page with information about the maintenance being
carried out. Switching the login page over to this static web page is
referred to as "flipping the user interface" and done by the systems
engineers via a button in their control panel that says "flip the UI"
(with a few options, for example, relating to which of about 25 possible
UIs should be flipped). Unlike a switch that can be flipped iteratively
(flipped once, and then flipped again and again and again), the UI is at
any given moment in one of two states: "flipped", or, well, not.

A while ago, after the maintenance was over and the system was supposed
to be accessible again, some of the web servers didn't show the login
screen, but the maintenance page. I notified the appropriate person (in
the jargon, my escalation point) of the problem, who sent a message to
the network operations people saying, I quote, while cutting out some
server names and some such, "On some of the UI boxes [i.e. servers,
computers], the French and German versions of the UI are still not
unflipped. Can you make sure to unflip them all?" While exchanges of
this type at my workplace frequently involve non-native speakers, this
particular colleague is a native speaker of Canadian English.

Where I work, we don't flip and then flip back: we flip and unflip. (And
no, I know it's not pleonastic here.)

Chris Waigl

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