About

I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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I would have to say that most instructions I come across are unimportant and some are harmful. Most instructions I get about software development process, I would say, would be harmful if I believed them and followed them. Most software process instructions I encounter are fairy tales, both in the sense of being made up and in the sense of being cartoonish. Some things that look like instructions, such as "do not try this at home" or "take out the safety card and follow along," are not properly instructions at all, they are really just ritual phrases uttered to dispel the evil spirits of legal liability.

James Bach



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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

Totals
Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,727,057

Averages
Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 345

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 2:37 PM Pacific


  09:25 PM

Wow, December already. For those of us who are really insistent on the meaning derived from etymology, this means it's the 10th month, right? Haha.

As sometimes happens, I found this week's new-to-me word because all of a sudden it seemed like it was popping up everywhere. (This is sometimes known as the frequency illusion or the more colorful Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.) The new word is ultracrepidarian, which is an adjective or noun for someone who opines on subjects outside their area of expertise.

I first saw it because the Twitter user Edward Banatt uses the term as part of his profile. Since he presumably wrote his own profile, we have to assume that he's using the term in a self-deprecating or ironic way. But within days of noticing this, I was told that the legal writer and style-guide author Bryan Garner had referred to the linguist John McWhorter as an ultracrepidarian. Garner definitely was using it in a negative way.

To be honest, most people are probably ultracrepidarians. I mean, we all gift the world with our judgments about politics and economics and (ahem) language usage, but realistically, most of us are not experts on these things. Obviously, we aren't usually going to label ourselves as ultracrepidarians (Banatt notwithstanding), but it seems like a useful term to keep handy when someone else seems to be talking through their hat.

So, funny story about the origins of this term. It consists of ultra ("beyond") with crepidam, a classical root referring to shoes or the soles of shoes. Per one dictionary, the term originates with Pliny the Elder's phrase ne supra crepidam sutor judicare ("let the cobbler not judge above the sandal"), i.e., don't blather about things you are not qualified to discuss. The term has been in English since at least 1819, which should have given me plenty of time to have heard it by now.

And that isn't even today's unexpected word origin! From a Facebook post this week I learned the origins of the word janitor. Etymologically speaking, a janitor is a "door guard," from Latin janua, meaning "door" or "entrance." Here's the fun part: janua is related to the name Janus, the two-faced god of doors, gates, and other portals. And! Janus was also associated with change and transitions ("When one door opens …"), which is how we ended up with the name of our first month: January. This was all very satisfying to me.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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