[HN Gopher] 'Dord': A Ghost Word
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'Dord': A Ghost Word
Author : joe5150
Score : 96 points
Date : 2020-06-01 06:27 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.merriam-webster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.merriam-webster.com)
| erichurkman wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't just adopt it as a fictitious entry?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
| phoe-krk wrote:
| The article mentions the abbreviation ULEC, but it does not
| define it. Does anyone know what it means?
| webkike wrote:
| Right above its first usage: Universal Lexicographer's Ethical
| Code
| barrkel wrote:
| The cards are more interesting to me than the word, which I
| originally thought was going to be some kind of copyright-
| protecting deliberate mistake.
|
| The cards remind me of Jira tickets, with stamps and names as a
| kind of audit log of work associated with the ticket. I find
| myself curious about the information architecture and paper
| processes that companies built around such tickets going to and
| fro.
|
| Such architectures probably have fairly close analogues in
| distributed systems, and there may be a thing or two to learn
| from how more innovative and efficient organizations structured
| their paper pushing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Speaking of that, I need to find time one of these days to
| research what the hell "a memo" is. I understand it was a piece
| of paper of sorts, used in a way similar to how e-mails are
| used today, but I don't understand how they were delivered to
| people, what was the equivalent of MTA there. I know how to use
| the word in writing ("I didn't get the memo"), but not much
| more than that.
| burlesona wrote:
| My understanding is these were printed letters circulated
| internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who
| circulated both internal and external mail - so a couple
| times a day someone would come by with letters for you, both
| from the outside world, and from inside the office. Memoranda
| were generally announcements distributed to many people in
| the office.
|
| There were normally two trays or boxes for paper on people's
| desk, one was the "inbox" and one was the "outbox," and the
| mail person would place the new stuff in the inbox and take
| anything from the outbox to circulate it around the office.
|
| I never really lived that, although my first desk job did
| have an inbox and an outbox, the team wasn't big enough to
| have a mailroom, so we would just use those boxes to drop
| papers at other people's desks - hence the outbox didn't
| really get used, but the inbox did. Usually once a day a
| bundle of mail would get dropped off at the front desk and
| someone would take a turn walking the letters around the
| office, but there weren't that many of them as email was
| already a thing at that point.
| easygenes wrote:
| Memo is abbreviated, firstly. The word is memorandum, and as
| the Latin root suggests, is something to "bring to mind."
| Typically written or typed notes, which might get copied and
| passed around. They have more jargon meanings in certain
| contexts.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Having worked somewhere that still used physical memos, I can
| share my experience. They were simply "important" notices and
| announcements printed on single sheets of paper hand-
| delivered to our desks by one of the managers or their
| secretaries. They'd often be on our desks before we got in,
| containing information that was realized the day before, but
| anything particularly urgent would be hand-delivered during
| the work day, usually around lunch.
|
| They were completely interchangeable with emails, including
| in the way they were written (like short letters). I don't
| understand why we used them, but alas, we did.
| ink_13 wrote:
| The internal "mail room" used to be a much bigger deal. At
| large companies, some number of times a day an actual person
| would come around with a cart, put things in your in-tray and
| remove things from your out-tray. Once their round had been
| completed they would return to the mail room to sort the
| outgoing materials and then repeat the process.
|
| I suspect that one of the reasons "starting in the mail room"
| used to be so venerated is that it's a good way to get to
| know a wide swath of people inside a company in a relatively
| short period.
| superhuzza wrote:
| The urgency in that correction slip is amusing (Imperative!
| Urgent! A ghost word!), considering how inconsequential of a
| mistake it is.
|
| What's the absolute worst case caused by a ghost word like dord -
| someone accidentally uses it in a paper?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| that it might become perfectly cromulent?
| microtherion wrote:
| There is a related story where a real, but misunderstood four
| letter word made its way into a well known poem:
| http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001814.h...
| meowface wrote:
| Apparently they agreed with you, because it was fixed 8 years
| after that note described how urgent it was.
| [deleted]
| alxmdev wrote:
| Put yourself in the editor's shoes, caring for the dictionary
| is your life's work. Aside from misspellings, grammatical or
| factual errors, and typography issues, this is the other kind
| of bug that can rear its ugly head. Not to mention that you
| can't issue patches to copies that already shipped :-)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is like a biological mutation, usually nothing. It could
| result in a massive misinterpretation of prior documents due to
| a shift in meaning and not understanding the lack of shift in
| context. Not very predictable but often hillarious like say
| Moses being depicted as horned. It probably involves very long
| timelines even with cultural acceleration.
|
| Imagine "dord" caught on as a synonym for density in all its
| senses including stupidity. Now imagine one document of a riot
| caused after accidentally ordering a squad to shoot when
| calling out about a fire. A poorly chosen "word" causing death
| gets corrupted to a misplaced "dord" and it gets taken as
| caused by one idiot who shouldn't have been chosen to lead
| (also accurate but not intended). A mention of a D or d in the
| chemical context taken as a stealth insult or joke like 1D10T
| Error.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The urgency in that correction slip is amusing (Imperative!
| Urgent! A ghost word!), considering how inconsequential of a
| mistake it is._
|
| For some people everything is urgent. Everything.
|
| It's part of the reason that web pages because so unusable.
| Every single lower middle manager thinks their change is the
| most important thing in the world.
| tom_ wrote:
| Perhaps wider events in the period 1940-7 pushed this urgent,
| imperative issue further down the priority list than might
| otherwise have been the case.
| hirundo wrote:
| Dord is a perfectly cromulent word.
| bruce_the_bruce wrote:
| I would say dord is a woody sort of word... dord.
| mci wrote:
| In 1995, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, a long-time publisher
| of dictionaries, sued Kurpisz, a new publishing house, for
| plagiarizing their large dictionary of Polish. The case was
| closed in favor of PWN in 2005, hitting the Supreme Court along
| the way.
|
| Among the evidence against Kurpisz was their entry on the nonce
| word "amikus" (meaning "friend"), which they illustrated with the
| quotation "spijal sie ze swoimi amikusami" (he was getting drunk
| with his friends) but could not tell the court where they had
| gotten the quotation from. Nowadays, with libraries digitizing
| every flimsy old book, they would find the source easily.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Reading this, I realised the fnords are everywhere, once you know
| how[0] to look for them.
|
| 0: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22fn+or+d%22
| ggm wrote:
| Fnord! Dillinger says hello
| macintux wrote:
| I thought for a moment this might be like a trap street.
| colanderman wrote:
| There are in fact such words, e.g. "esquivalence":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Oxford_American_Dictionary...
| cgriswald wrote:
| I don't know how that can work in practice. If it's in a
| dictionary, it might get used and then... it should be in
| other dictionaries. Do they cycle them in and out?
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