Organizations and Markets

9 Comments Add your own

• 1. Joe Mahoney  |  7 April 2007 at 11:56 pm

  Yeah! Rules on the proper use of the word methodology, which are to govern me and thee, and which will be enforced by an intellectual hue and cry, and we will stone thee if thou resisth and expel thee from the tribe.

  Or perhaps we could lighten up a little? After a Full day of Karl Marx, a little Groucho Marx is in order:

  “I just shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.”

  Good night, my good friend Peter :-)

• 2. Peter Klein  |  8 April 2007 at 8:20 pm

  Touché! But if I can’t be a curmudgeon, what am I going to blog about?

• 3. Chihmao Hsieh  |  9 April 2007 at 6:40 pm

  It is truly amazing just how much the etymological structure of words can throw a wrench in semantics.

  Here’s my own first-hand anecdote, a true recent story. Essentially I have a paper that makes the distinction between learning domains ’separately’ versus ‘together.’ Colleagues repeatedly asked me to reconsider those labels. First, it was because the label ‘together’ can’t be used to modify ‘learning’ from the front: While ’separated learning’ might make sense, ‘together learning’ does not. And then I found I couldn’t put it in back, because ‘learning together’ often was unnecessarily confused as PEOPLE learning together not DOMAINS learned together. And ‘learning togetherly’ sounded truly hopeless.

  So then, I changed the term ‘together’ to ’simultaneous,’ which wasn’t quite what I wanted. Then somebody said that if I use ’simultaneous’ I should naturally change ’separately’ to ’sequentially,’ which definitely wasn’t my intent semantically.

  Oh man. Then I tried out ‘blocked’ versus ‘interleaved’ a la the cognitive psychology literature. I also tried ‘blocked’ versus ‘intermittent.’ How do those cognitive psychologists manage?! ‘Blockedly’? ‘Interleavedly’? Really!

  In the end now I’ve pretty much settled on ’separated’ versus ‘concomitant’ learning. Both terms can accept the (-ly) suffix and when combined with the word ‘learning’ legitimately appear to describe the term ‘learning’ without appearing to describe people themselves.

  I hope this paper goes somewhere nice.

• 4. JiE  |  10 April 2007 at 7:47 am

  Thanks for reminding!

• 5. Peter Klein  |  10 April 2007 at 11:27 am

  Chihmao, your story reminds me of Orwell’s remark about always following the rules of grammar, except when you shouldn’t.

  Ah, thanks to Google, here’s the whole bit, from Politics and the English Language (see especially last bullet):

  * Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

  * Never us a long word where a short one will do.

  * If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

  * Never use the passive where you can use the active.

  * Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  * Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

• 6. Chihmao Hsieh  |  10 April 2007 at 5:52 pm

  Speaking of cringing from English: What used to make me cringe before — poor spelling — now no longer pains me so. Observe:

  “I cdnuolt bleveiee taht I cloud aulacity uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervy lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh, and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!”

• 7. Method or Methodology? &l&hellip  |  18 October 2008 at 3:59 pm

  [...] 18, 2008 by softthoughts In the following post a reminder is made of the correct use of the word method and methodology. In a lot of software [...]

• 8. Rafe Champion  |  25 December 2008 at 1:09 am

  A nice point.
  It would be good to keep alive the distinction between disinterested and uninterested as well. It seems that in journalism the decline in comprehension of the term “disinterested” has marched in parallel with the rise of partisan reporting.
  The good news on George Orwell’s essays is that all four volumes of the collected essays are on line at Questia.
  http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp
  Also Hayek on Hayek (which is never on the shelf in the library at Sydney Uni).
  Another good read every few years (in additon to Orwell on the English language) is the appendix to C Wright Mills “The Sociological Imagination” on Intellectual Craftsmanship.
  http://www.amazon.com/review/R17CAPGSQLDA68/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

• 9. Derek  |  17 March 2009 at 9:55 am

  Arise old thread…!

  I would like to add the stupid use of the term ‘fully’. I.e. “are you fully qualified?” and “the car is fully airconditioned”

  I contend that qualified is as it says, and nything short of that should be referred to as part-qualified. (and partly- airconditioned)

  My (2c)

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