WordLo

Have we been punished by a confusion of tongues?
Sure, there are tangible differences between, say, a page-based or a component-based system. And some labels are rooted in their underlying technology. Still, there's a couple of archetypes we could at least attempt to label similarly. But while the lingua franca of content technologies is English, vendors aren't exactly using the same dictionaries. I was recently advising one of our customers throughout several vendor demos. It was a great reminder of why we spend so much time explaining what each system does exactly. And a substantial part of that is translation from sets of arbitrary lingo to more generically intelligible terms.Witness one of the vendor's attempts to explain: "No, in our system, paragraphs are not paragraphs, they're page elements." So why not call them that? (And, of course, one of the developers at the other side of the table remarked "but paragraphs are page elements" -- "ye…

published on: worldwidewords

AfPak is the usual shorthand way in military and political circles, especially within Washington and NATO, to refer to Afghanistan and Pakistan jointly. The term began to appear widely in newspapers in early February 2009, following a speech given by the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then recently appointed as US special envoy to the region, to a security conference in Munich on 8 February. He said:First of all, we often call the problem AfPak, as in Afghanistan Pakistan. This is not just an effort to save eight syllables. It is an attempt to indicate and imprint in our DNA the fact that there is one theater of war, straddling an ill-defined border, the Durand Line, and that on the western side of that border, NATO and other forces are able to operate. On the eastern side, it’s the sovereign territory of Pakistan. But it is on the eastern side of this ill-defined border that the international terrorist movement is located. Hampton Roads International Secur…

A guide to some of the spy tradecraft allegedly uncovered by US investigators

published on: Guardian

• Illegals:The name used by Russia's overseas intelligence agency, the SVR, for its secret agents living in the US.

• Legend:The false identities provided to the illegals before they leave Russia, and then built up inside the US.

• Deep cover: When the agents are entrenched within their host society for years or decades.

• Steganography: From the Greek, meaning "concealed writing", the placing of hidden messages. The modern version involves the encryption of messages concealed within the binary code of digital images on publicly accessible internet sites.

• Ad hoc network: Covert communication between a pair of laptop computers temporarily linked to exchange files.

• Brush-past meetings: Also known as "flash meetings", where two people secretly pass items as one walks past the other in a public place.

• Radiograms: Bursts of coded radio data to the agents' handlers …

Sunset, verb. To be in the process of becoming obsolete; a "sunsetting device". (Cf. the already well established and uncommonly ugly legacy, adjective: already obsolete; a "legacy computer")

Readcast, verb. To read something while similarly transmitting on several social media the fact that you are reading it and what you think of it.

Vook, noun. A book composed of both video and text; also, the name of the company that invented the vook for the iPad.

Swype, verb. Allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard to spell words, rather than tapping out each letter.


published on: Johnson

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Sunsetting and Readcasting

tratto da:punto informatico

Il verbo da Facebook "unfriend" arriva nei dizionari di lingua inglese e diventa parola dell'anno. D'altronde la lingua è una questione sociale, e questi sono social network: appunto Roma - Negli ultimi anni il linguaggio della Rete ha ricevuto sempre più la consacrazione dei vocabolari, e della lingua ufficiale che cambia e si piega alle esigenze e ai tempi dei nuovi mezzi: così già erano entrati nel linguaggio comune Twitter, Facebook e blog (anche come verbi twittare, facebookare e bloggare). E, anche quest'anno, il social network in blu è protagonista dell'evoluzione degli idiomi.
È ancora Facebook l'origine della parola che meglio rappresenta il 2009: Unfriend (verbo), che secondo l'Oxford Dictionary significa "rimuovere qualcuno come amico da un social network come Facebook".
Oltre a questo neologismo nato dal web 2.0, nel 2010 saranno riconosciuti altri termini sorti dall'ICT. Solo per fare alcuni esempi, …

Perché il calcio viene chiamato in modo diverso da inglesi (football) e americani (soccer)?

I due termini, football e soccer, si usano per indicare lo stesso sport sebbene football sia presente in un maggior numero di lingue con un più alto numero di occorrenze.

Footballrisale a un decreto del 1424 in cui re Giacomo I di Scozia bandiva il gioco con la frase: "That na man play at the Fute-ball".

Nel 1863 viene fondata a Londra la Football Association (FA), la prima federazione calcistica nazionale che unificò definitivamente il regolamento. Queste regole furono adottate da tutti eccetto che dalla Scuola di Rugby, che preferiva un gioco più fisico in cui si potesse toccare il pallone anche con le mani. Si venne a creare cosi il termine soccer, entrato a far parte dello slang universitario comeabbreviazione colloquiale di Assoc., da  Association football+ la formazione agentiva "-er" per distinguerlo dal Rugby Football.

Fonti:


Terminologia etcEnglishfor.it

Will a new pride of economic lions take their place beside the Chinese dragon and the Indian tiger?


The term "tiger economies" to refer to the fab four of Asia dates back to the 1960s. (They are also known as the "little dragons" owing to China's influence.) Ireland adopted the "Celtic tiger" in the 1990s, despite there being no such beast—presumably it was worried that calling itself the "hare economy" would make it sound flaky. Scotland made a bid for "Celtic Lion" in 1997, on the reasonable basis that there is at least a lion on the Scottish Royal Standard. It never took off, though; neither did Scotland.Curiously, Russia's periodically hyperactive economy doesn't seem to have a common animal name. The "bear economy" is an obvious no-no, but people rarely use "tiger", even though there are tigers in Russia. Perhaps that's because they're Siberian tigers, which are in danger of going extinct. Sa…