"refudiate" (v.) repudiate (adj,)

[Federico Escobar]

Taking up "finger failure" again, back in March there were popular "fat
finger errors". Here's Ben Zimmer in a piece in the Visual Thesaurus:

***

Fat-finger compound phrases, alluding to errors on a keyboard or keypad, go
back at least twenty years. Such compounds can refer to intentionally
mispunched keys, as in this line from a March 31, 1990 article in The Dallas
Morning News: "Your college's phone bill has skyrocketed, because of student
hackers using the 'fat-finger' method of pounding out a combination of phone
codes to place unauthorized long-distance calls." And on his Wordspy
website, Paul McFedries defines fat-finger dialing as "a telephone scam in
which a company sets up a toll number that is one digit different than a
popular number, so that the company earns money when customers accidentally
mis-dial the legitimate number."


Previous market mishaps have been blamed on fat-finger errors, including a
notorious trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2005. The incident brought to
light so-called fat-finger syndrome, defined by The Guardian as "the
occasional tendency of stressed traders working in fast-moving electronic
financial markets to press the wrong button on their keyboard and, in the
process, lose their employer a mint." Such are the new pitfalls in the era
of the quants

***

Here's the link to that piece:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2281/

F.



On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "refudiate" (v.) repudiate (adj,)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Joel
>
> OK then. Did you mean Fingerfehler when you wrote "finger-failure"?
>
> I have seen a news report from London talk about "fat finger failure"
> in the context of pressing the wrong button entering an order to buy
> or sell stock in an electronic entry system, but the phrase doesn't
> seem to have any widespread popular use.
>
> Fingerfehler, on the other hand, has its own (German) Wiki page.
>
> DanG
>
> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      Re: "refudiate" (v.) repudiate (adj,)
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Dan, as I refudiated in my message, Palin didn't actually say
> > this.  It was my invention.  But I trust in the spirit of Palinisms.
> >
> > Joel
> >
> > At 12/29/2010 04:07 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> >>"Finger failure"? Did she mean "Fingerfehler", from the German, which
> >>I first learned when playing tournament chess as a kid, meaning to
> >>touch the wrong piece -- in tournament play, you have to move the
> >>first piece you touch? Chess lingo is filled with foreign words,
> >>especially German.
> >>
> >>DanG
>

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