I Believe . . . This Makes NO Sense

[Wilson Gray]

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:00 PM, Doug_Harris <cats22 at stny.rr.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Doug_Harris <cats22 at STNY.RR.COM>
> Subject:      Re: I Believe . . . This Makes NO Sense
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This 'standing out' always works this way with catch phrases:
> Somebody launches a little sailboat, and before you know it
> there's an entire flotilla. Then it -- the phrase -- sinks like
> a stone.
> When was the last time you heard someone talk to 'cleaning X's
> clock'? And WTF did _that_ mean???
> dh
>

I'm just happy that "cleaning X's plow" basically never attained more
than nonce status.

-Wilson

>
>
> two thoughts:
> 1) "neutral," being somewhat bland, does not fit the business requirement
> that you 'stand out' from the crowd.  (apparently, this 'stand out' feature
> is being eroded as the herd adopts it en masse.)
>
> 2) in technology circles, there are many firm 'believers' who back arguments
> almost entirely on something akin to dogmatic faith.  (e.g., Linux is
> *so*much better than PC.  etc).  so, in this context, the -agnostic suffix
> plays a bit off of that.
>
> Also, in the business/technology world, vendor lock-in is a significant
> problem, so it makes sense that safeguards against it would have their own
> words/phrases to be efficiently referenced.  Aside from the -agnostic
> suffix, another term for this is _vendor-neutral_.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Doug_Harris <cats22 at stny.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Doug_Harris <cats22 at STNY.RR.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: I Believe . . . This Makes NO Sense
>>
>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>>
>> Whatever happened to the world where "the business of business is
>> business" -- NOT (business being) an environment where perfectly
>> sensible words and phrases are displaced, for no real reason, by
>> totally nonsensical words or phrases.
>> They _mean_ 'neutral'. They should simply _say_ 'neutral'.
>> --
>> That said, I appreciate your feedback on this Ben. (And an appropriate
>> plus it _was_, too!)
>> dh
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Doug_Harris <cats22 at stny.rr.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > -agnostic -- as in product-agnostic, database-agnostic, vendor-agnostic.
>> > domain-agnostic, and so on.
>> > There seem to be, all of a sudden, an unbelievable, or un-provable,
>> number
>> > of variations on that sense-defying coinage.
>> > Do you suppose 'they' mean, say, product-neutral, as in something that
>> > applies to all products (within a range), or vendor-neutral, as in
>> something
>> > that would be applicable to or good for all vendors?
>> > I first encountered it in a training course for where the context was
>> that
>> > the company aims to "ensure all call-back script is product-agnostic to
>> > avoid any future [confusion]".
>> > Never mind the future: I was confused today!
>>
>> As it happens (shameless plug alert), Nancy Friedman's latest column for
>> the
>> Visual Thesaurus is all about the appropriation of religious terms in the
>> business world:
>>
>> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/1601/
>>
>> The full article is only available to subscribers (rates are quite
>> reasonable!), but Nancy helpfully excerpts the section on "agnostic" on
> her
>> own blog:
>>
>> ---
>>
>>
> http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2008/11/faithbased-business
>>
> .html<http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2008/11/faithbased-bu
> siness.html>
>> Agnostic: In religious parlance, agnostic -- literally "without knowledge"
>> -- refers to a person who has doubts about a deity or religious tenets.
>> (The
>> term was coined in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.) In
>> business, and especially in technology, agnostic is a suffix attached to
>> words such as platform, marketing, and media. In those contexts it simply
>> means "neutral" -- a platform-agnostic program can run on PCs, Macs, and
>> Linux machines; a media-agnostic publication is created for multiple
>> channels (print, online, broadcast, etc.).
>> ---
>>
>>
>> --Ben Zimmer
>>
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