Saturday July 16th, 2011. Posted by Alex:

A couple of linguistic gems, so to speak

The first I came across in my working life, so I will not mention the source:

This team of visionaries has worked passionately to develop the next generation of a service management solution, based on innovative and revolutionary technologies.

Translation: they have written some software that works quite well

The second is from the Yahoo! “Groups blog”:

Over the past few months, we have been evaluating your feedback on the new Groups experience that we have been testing with some groups for several months. Based on that feedback, we have decided to rollback the new Groups experience starting this Wednesday, January 12. We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts throughout this process.

Translation: we are cancelling some bad changes we made.

I’m particularly fond of “We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward.” See, there is still a need for courses in how to write! (Or maybe it’s “how to think”?)

2 comments to A couple of linguistic gems, so to speak

Lu

July 16, 2011 at 5:30 pm

These are classic. I think we should gather a whole bunch of them and publish them!…like that book “Non Campus Mentis” (you can Google it, I think) published the bad sentences from college essays.
paola Calabrini

July 17, 2011 at 10:44 am

)

Leave a Reply

It really is great if it works for you
Writing in the Guardian, Julian Baggini referred recently to the tendency of religious people to be critical of political or social wrongs, but to be jolly nice to the representatives of other religions. He repeats an anecdote (from Simon Blackburn) in which the representatives of various faiths react to each other’s presentations, saying, “Wow, […]
Benchen and Back – digital edition
It is now 20 years since, as the book itself explains, I was among the students taken by Lama Chime Rinpoche on a pilgrimage to his home monastery in Kham, eastern Tibet. We were the first group of westerners ever to have permission to enter that region. From Beijing via Xining and on to […]
Religions need secularism
Baroness Warsi has claimed that “intolerant secularisation has to be held back by reaffirming the religious foundations on which our societies are built”, while the Pope is reported to have recently attacked “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”. I’m not at all sure that I would recognise “intolerant secularisation” if I came across it. “Intolerant […]