Passing Thoughts on Some “O” Topics
Oatmeal - Healthy [organic available] and inexpensive [buy it in bulk] breakfast cereal that can be enhanced with cinnamon, dried apple chips, raisins or Craisins and chopped walnuts and which sticks to your ribs. My most frequent breakfast.
Obscenity - Justice Potter Stewart once wrote in a US Supreme Court opinion that defining obscenity was difficult, but “I know it when I see it”. Could that have been his excuse for burning the midnight oil viewing pornography? I prefer the approach of Justices William Douglas and Hugo Black, who believed essentially that freedom of speech means nothing is legally obscene.
Oceans - Covering 3/4 of the surface of the earth and dominating the planet ecologically, the oceans deserve much more respectful exploration and research than they receive. Space travel may seem more exciting, but the oceans of the earth are of more vital importance.
Oil - Who would have thought this dirty liquid would become so precious? It could be made as unessential as precious gems, and it possesses none of their inherent charms.
Old - An easy adjective to facilitate the grasp of relativity. In human beings, old is considered as more than 15 years greater than the person doing the considering, though as we get older, some of us increase the range.
Opinions - Someone said opinions “are like assholes - everyone has one”. Someone else added, “And nobody wants to look at the other person’s.”
Optimism - Seeing a half full glass instead of a half empty one - or a dirty one, or cracked one, or any other less than perfect perceptions of that proverbial glass. I admit to being a bit of a pessimist in the short run, but an optimist long term. Glasses might break, but there will always be water.
Organic - A once esoteric description of more healthy food, of interest only to a few eccentrics, now in the process of being watered down in meaning and converted to a mass marketing ploy. Sincere co-operation between food producers and government regulators could make organic standards meaningful for the general public, but mass retailers like Wal-Mart are becoming players in the process, increasing the likelihood that merchandising will trump health.
Osama bin Laden - The man whose supposed number twos keep getting killed and quickly replaced. The chief criminal of 9/11 who was barely chased by the George W. Bush administration, which chose instead to go after Saddam Hussein and Iraqi oil. Also known in the Bush Administration as “Osama been Forgotten”.
Outsourcing - Euphemism for what Ross Perot in 1992 more colorfully and correctly labeled “a loud sucking sound”.
posted by Tom Blake | 10:10 AM
5 Comments:
How about oxymoron for an O word? In my careers, I have had to make speeches from time to time. And I have never been comfortable in that role. One of my speeches was given to congratulate a group that had reached a milestone after being in deep trouble - way behind schedule and way over budget. I came close to getting fired over it and others were also in big trouble. The name of the software project was SAFE, an acronym for something I cannot remember. We were all in good spirits because we had turned the project around. I opened my speech with what I thought was a great joke: we are here to honor SAFE, the only one word oxymoron I know. Utter silence ensued. Later, a couple of people who consulted a dictionary told me that was a great line.
So most people don't know what an oxymoron is. It is a self contradictory figure of speech. Examples are: thunderous silence, jumbo shrimp, military intelligence. All my examples include two words. Hence my joke. Is anybody out there laughing? I still giggle over it.
John from Phoenix
Please help. I don't get it, even after checking the dictionary. It must be a scientific thing. Check out this article by the retired chief scientist of Accenture, who says "standards" is a one word oxymoron. I don't get that one either.
Here is an example I do get: "currently-suffering fans of our local baseball team here in the San Francisco Bay Area have proposed what may be the world's first one-word oxymoron: Giants!" I also get "extraordinary" and "spendthrift". A law related one word oxymoron is "brief", the name for the lengthy written presentation a lawyer submits
I love the definition of oxymoron from my 1939 Webster's. It points out the word comes from the Greek words for sharp and dull and it meant a smart saying which at first appears dull. Webster says it is a rhetorical figure in which an epithet of a quite contrary signification is added to a word, and then gives an example which seems to define what oxymorons do - "cruel kindness".
One moron used an oxymoron to campaign for the US Presidency - George W. Bush, the "compassionate conservative".
Here is the website for the man who literally wrote the book on Oxymorons. Unfortunately, his alphabetical list of oxymorons is only up to the letter R, so we don't yet know if he will include "safe".
First of all I am disillusioned to discover I am not the first person to make a joke about one word oxymorons. At least the people in my audience didn't know that; indeed, they didn't know what an oxymoron is.
Tom, your are right. The word "safe" is not an oxymoron. A software development project team reporting to me was writing a computer program called SAFE. So the project was called SAFE. Project SAFE got in deep trouble and my boss and I were pointing fingers at each other after the customer complained to the VP of development. For a week neither of us knew our fates, and we both knew we could be fired. Then we were called into the VP's office and my boss was exiled to a nothing project and I was told to fix the SAFE project (and was given resources). We did it with 80+ hour working weeks, and then we had the luncheon to celebrate our success. And I told my joke. The point of the joke is that the SAFE project had been anything but safe to be associated with.
The standards one word oxymoron joke is a little more complex, but very apt. The article you referenced tells it well. Standards groups form within an industry. The various firms from around the world that belong to a particular industry send representatives to the group, most often top engineers. The richest firms send the most representatives so they normally dominate the group. I had employees who were involved in standards groups who were quite helpful in devloping the standards, but my company was weak and we seldom got our way.
For example, some many decades ago, some standards group decided on the technical specifications for light bulb bases. I know of maybe half a dozen different sized bases for light bulbs, but there are probably many more. If such a group never existed, you would have to buy a GE lamp for a GE light bulb and a Phillips lamp for a Phillips light bulb.
When a technology is new, every company participating in the standards group wants its technological vision to become the standard because its engineering department is already building acording to that would-be standard and everyone else would have to play catch-up.
As the author also points out, even the companies whose technologies are adopted as standards cheat and build something non-standard because it is an enhancement that will sell more product that the competition.
This is the way engineering is, was and always will be: a dialectic between standards and innovation.
As technologies age and standards become more dominant, the manufacture of that technology moves to countries that have cheap labor. Tom, you and I are old enough to remember when TV's were designed and manufactured in the US!
So there is the joke: standards aren't.
John from Phoenix
I have always been fascinated by the concept of "human engineering", meaning the design of products so that real people can use them. I am not very talented in engineering aspects, but I consider I am at least as capable as the average person. So when I cannot get something to work, I jump to the conclusion it is poorly designed due to lack of human engineering. As you point out, engineers invest a lot of time and energy in developing a product, so they are reluctant to see it not become adopted.
Sometimes the engineer types are the only ones who test and finalize the product and they leave the ulimate user people out of the process. The result can be incomprehensible to the ultimate user. I consider the VCR as a classic example. Many people were never able to figure out how to set the machine to record a later TV show. I think a large part of the problem is that the VCR recording a later show is the only electrical device that you have to turn OFF in order for it to work.
I just started reading a good book on this subject, "The Design of Everyday Things", formerly entitled "The Psychology of Everyday Things". The title was changed because it was determined that business people, who could benefit by reading the book, were not interested in reading books on Psychology.
Very true. We had engineers doing testing at Honeywell and Motorola. But at Honeywell the product we were delivering was to be run by technicians, some of whom might be engineers. So we would bribe favored customers to become beta sites for our new products. The bribe would be in the form of reduced cost, maybe even free. We would then use their experience to improve the product. That worked in the Honeywell case, but does not work for cell phones at Motorola, or your example, VCR's. Motorola might have a customer program for cell phones, but I did not hear of it while I was there.
John from Phoenix
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