More stones to un-turn

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:31 AM +0100 8/7/07, Chris F Waigl wrote:
>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
>
Right; as I think I was noting a few months ago, software gurus and
geeks are responsible for the depleonasticization of many a
previously pleonastic un-verb:  "unerase, undelete, unsort (and the
extension of related un-verbs, e.g. "unfuck").  It's all very sad for
us devotees of the redundant un-verb.

LH

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