Words and phrases I've had to look up recently, or at least think about

I think everyone, however educated they are, has to look up a word or phrase occasionally as there are many more words in the English language than those we use every day. 

Sometimes I even double-check a word I know well because there's a danger I may be slightly misusing it. I discovered the other day that the phrase "tee hee" is actually read as being a bit sarcastic and dismissive - I would use it as laughing at a groanworthy pun as opposed to "haha" which is something straightforwardly funny. I might not use it like that now, if it will be misread ;)

The things I probably look up most (or ask people what they mean by them) are the three word compound phrases where it's not immediately clear (from the phrase alone) which of the two words go together. 

It might become rapidly clear from the context arriving seconds later of course, but I'd rather have the context first to avoid the cognitive pivot-table* (having your brain flipped about a bit) of wondering what exactly is being discussed.

"Building information modelling"
I know what all of these words mean individually but I'm not involved in the topic (construction) where this is a 'thing' so I arrive at this phrase having to make sense of it having not encountered it before. The word 'building' is both a noun and a verb so at first glance I've no idea if we are building something like software to model information or if we are developing a model to handle information about buildings. In the context it was the second option. It is indeed a thing - BIM (Building Information Modelling) is "a process for creating and managing all of the information on a construction project".

Mathematically...
(Building information) modelling - ✔️
Building (information modelling) - ✖️

"Flattened narrative"
I still don't know what this means despite being fully confident about both of the individual words. I saw the phrase in passing in a screenshot of text so I didn't find it again easily after searching. Googling didn't bring up an obvious 'flattened narrative means X' and the use by others didn't match precisely with what I'd seen (entirely possible that people use the phrase in different contexts). 

My guess was that it referenced a storyline or character arc that was rather 2-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional. But that doesn't really stack up because if you weren't good at writing a story or character your writing might be described as 'flat' but not 'flattened' which suggests a previous degree of height or dimensionality that you or someone has squashed. Who is flattening narratives and why are they being flattened?

I'm one hundred per cent confident that I will understand the concept when it is explained to me, or I can be bothered to drill into a few of the excerpts Google suggested and infer its meaning from the comprehensible input (where you can work out what something means from its context). The problem is that the pointer (the phrase which points to the probably-very-intelligible concept) is currently beyond my immediate, effort-free understanding. I'm being lazy!

Enterprise

A colleague is the Head of Careers & Enterprise at my university. I know that Enterprise can mean an organisation or an undertaking (not to mention Star Trek ships which do the second one) but I'm not sure how it differentiates itself from 'careers' though. E.g. if I was a student making an appointment what information would be forthcoming if I were to say "actually I'm not interested in Careers as such, what do you have in Enterprise?".

My guess is it has something to do with being self-employed where you're not filling in application forms for a job...?

"Compute"

This one really made me laugh. I saw a Government document where they kept using it and I was convinced it must have been written by someone with English as a second language or where there had been a global 'replace all' error that hadn't been picked up in the proofreading. 

Independent Review of the Future of Compute: Final report and recommendations

The verb 'compute' means to do a calculation (or not, as in 'Does Not Compute') but it turned out that in this context it was being used as a noun to refer to computing 'horsepower'. I've been working in a computer science university department for 14 years and had never encountered this usage as a noun. From speaking to a few others it seems to have been around for a while but is reasonably niche. 

From the archives: "feet of clay"

When I was at university aged ~20/21 I had a discussion with my then-boyfriend about what the phrase feet of clay might mean as neither of us was certain and this was 1990 where you couldn't just Google it and we didn't have a phrase dictionary on us, or a bible.

It could mean several things couldn't it, if you don't know how it's used?

I thought it might mean having a degree of solidity, sensibleness and groundedness. Boyfriend thought it might mean "can't run very fast". We came up with a few other options and were both quite surprised to discover that it means "character flaw" as in 'a bit disappointing', in that it references an unfinished or cheaply finished sculpture which looks great when you're looking up at it but when you look down at the feet they've not been properly cast. It comes from the book of Daniel in the bible.

- - - -

*a pivot-table is where you take data in columns and rows and press a button in Excel etc to summarise the data - it is not the same as Paste Special > Transpose where you convert a column to a row or a row to a column, which is a different sort of pivoting.

Learned a new word today - "compute", yep.

Does not compute

Earlier today I came across this report ...

"Independent review of The Future of Compute: Final report and recommendations,
updated 6 March 2023"

... which had the word compute in the title and in several other places within the document. I skimmed through trying to work out if they meant 'computing' or 'computer(s)' or 'computer science' and couldn't understand what was going on. Surely someone proofreading it would have caught this. 

Bernard... Delaney
I did wonder if the authors had had enough of trying to decide whether to write 'computing' or 'computer science' and elected to simplify things with this new word and wondered if anyone else had noticed.

Taking the web page's link (URL) and pasting it into Twitter's search bar brings up any tweet that's mentioned that page. There were a few tweets but none of them mentioned the fact that the document used the word (to me, a verb) 'compute' as a noun the whole way through. Here are the section titles.

    Glossary of terms
    1. The significance of compute for the UK
    2. The international landscape of compute
    3. The demand for compute in the UK
    4. Meeting the UK’s compute needs
    5. Creating a vibrant compute ecosystem

 

Oh, I see!
To cut a long story short (I read the glossary, and asked people on Twitter) it turns out that the word has been used in this way for some time and refers to something like the computing equivalent of horsepower - the amount of processing resources and computational capacity your high performance computer has to complete a task.

The thing is... I work in the computer science department at Queen Mary University of London and write about computer science in my day job and I have never seen 'compute' used in quite this way before. You'd think it might have come up in the fourteen years I've been working there. 

Anyway I wanted to record this moment as it's not often you're "there" and able to remember exactly when you encounter a completely new word, or in this case a completely novel use of a word you're familiar with. 

It's not just jargon you have to worry about
This is actually a bit of a 'thing' in science communication. Scientists often talk about a 'theory' or about 'proteins' etc and, if talking to non-scientists, need to be aware that their audience might take a different meaning from the one intended. 

To a scientist a 'protein' might be a peptide, enzyme, membrane protein but to a non-scientist it might be egg or meat etc. 

To be honest an unfamiliar word in place of 'compute' would actually have been much less jarring and so I've basically been the 'non-scientist' here, experiencing an example of an everyday word being used in a very specific way. I'm sure it's good for me to be baffled occasionally :)

But for now I'm still at the point where a phrase like "the amount of compute used" just brings me up short and also makes me laugh a little. I expect after a period of time has passed I will adjust to this noun-ing of a verb. 

Fives - a game I played with my parents when little

I can't remember when I started playing this with my parents, probably in single digits. It's not the most thrilling of games, compared with the excitements of iPads and games centres but it's quite a satisfying logic puzzle, and can probably be adapted for younger children (see below).

• It's a two person game.
• Each person thinks of a five-letter word where no letter is the same, eg house, knife, apron, films etc (generally we excluded plurals but of course "she films the event" gets round that!)
• Write your word down on a piece of paper, kept hidden from opponent, also write, on same piece of paper the alphabet in full.
• The first player takes it in turn to say another five letter word (anything except proper names and this time it can include words with the same letter in multiple times, such as PUPPY) and the second player says how many letters in that word are also in their word, but not which one*.

Eg, your hidden word (my target) is FILMS

• In my first guess I say POPPY - there are no letters in common, and I can cross off O, P and Y from my list of letters.
• (Then you have your turn)
• In my second guess I say PUPPY (I already know that P and Y aren't in this, so this lets me determine if O is there or not - again no letters in common and in two goes I've crossed off four letters, two of them vowels.
• (It's your go)
• I guess POEMS - you tell me there are two letters in common with my word, though I don't know which. I know P and O are not in it, leaving E, M and S so I need to find a word to help me work out which.
• (Your go)
• I try POESY (we're allowed archaic words) and you tell me there's only 1 letter, but is it the E or the S?
• (Your go)
• I try SOPPY - you say 1 letter is there, so I know that S is IN your word, definitely, still have to find a way to guess whether the other letter is E or M.
• (Your go)
• I try QUEEN - you say no letters, so I know it's not the E (and therefore must be the M) and I've also eliminated Q, U and N as well (in total E, N, O, P, Q, U and Y eliminated)
• and so on... 
• You can continue playing until someone gets their word or carry on until both people have.

In fact PUPPY and POPPY were pretty much how we always started the game, so we might as well call it the puppy opening gambit :)
 
Strategies
Sometimes you try a word with lots of common letters, to open things up a bit and find new some letters to work with, other times you're playing a much tighter game (eg POPPY and PUPPY) to try and pin down or eliminate a particular letter. Sometimes you might want to check something and use a word to confirm you're right about a particular letter, eg at the stage I've left it at the word OPENS should have only 1 letter in common with yours. This doesn't really tell me anything new (I already knew from SOPPY that it had an S in it, but confirms that S is and O, P, E and N aren't - assuming I'd not made a mistake).

*Adaptations for smaller people
For younger children who perhaps don't have a wealth of 5-letter words to hand, you could let them pick any word they like, and take turns in saying other words. Or you could just say which letter is there (eg S is there, but O, P, E and N aren't), or even which position it's in in the word ("the letter S is at the end of my word"). You could just guess letters ("is J in it?" and so on).

You could also do a variation of hangman but instead of hangman call it something less murderous, like swing game, so that with each turn (whether or not successful) you're building a swing for a stick figure to swing on.

In both games - fives, and 'swings' you get to see a copy of the full alphabet in front of you which possibly helps with letter familiarity. 'Swings' might be a good way to show the importance of vowels, and letter frequency. Fives has a bit of 'strategic thinking' about it, if played as outlined above, so possibly needs more adaptation for little children.

Diabetes and language used in healthcare and research

NB. Likely a few more links to be added in, I am working on a slightly uncooperative wifi network at the moment

I took part in a work-related Twitter chat last night, about avoiding errors in the self-management of diabetes.

The project I work on, CHI+MED, is looking at ways of making interactive medical devices safer but to do this we don't just study the devices themselves but also the people who use them and the systems that the machines are used in - basically it's a "sociotechnical" model sort of thing.

People know that they make errors in using machines. Sometimes the system helps them to prevent this, for example I've made good use of the delete key while typing this post, someone had the good sense to add one in to keyboard design. Sometimes people develop their own cunning plans to prevent errors. These are 'resilience strategies' (strategies that make them resilient to error) that are either generated by the person themselves or picked up from colleagues - they're rarely 'in the instruction manual' and they're not part of any official training.

But they can be really useful - both to other people who are using that medical device, but also to researchers who want to find out the strategies people employ to prevent mishaps.

And that's what the chat was about - what are the sorts of errors that people with diabetes (particularly Type 1 diabetes who are regularly monitoring their blood glucose levels and adjusting doses of injected insulin) might make and what tricks have they developed to try and avoid making an error.

One interesting things that came up was the language used by error researchers and how this might conflict with that used by people with diabetes or diabetes researchers. Dom (a colleague on CHI+MED who was co-hosting the Tweetchat with @OurDiabetes) uses terms like slip, mistake and violation which have precise meanings in the context of human factors and ergonomics research.

One of the people participating in the chat felt that the word violation was a bit of a strong term - it certainly carries negative connotations. Suzette Woodward has a helpful post explaining some of the examples of violations (eg of policies) in a healthcare setting: Working to rule?

Language used in different disciplines often has the potential to offend, or even just misfire, when heard by other people out of context.

I remember, when working in a GPs' surgery 10 years ago, reading that "the patient denied having any chest pains" and being amused at the implication that the doctor knew full well that the patient was having chest pains but that the patient wasn't having any of it. That's not what it means of course, it just seemed a strange way to say "the patient reported that he was not experiencing any chest pains" but "deny" carries other meanings to those not immersed in this use of language.

Similarly there are terms used in healthcare research looking at situations where medication is just not taken. It might be forgotten, lost (stolen?), unusable (damaged) and so not used. Equally it might be intentionally not used.

The various terms I came across that meant "not taking his or her medication" were non-compliance, non-adherence and non-concordance. All mean more or less the same thing but non-compliant sounds a bit more "naughty diabetic*" and "non-concordance" suggests a certain disagreement between patient and doctor.

*I do of course mean "naughty person with diabetes" ;-)

Further reading

• Errordiary learning zone / brain food - explains why Dom is collecting errors for research purposes
• Can resilience strategies help with diabetes management? - from Dom's own blog
• Can Errordiary be used to support patient safety education? - from Errordiary
• Unintentional non-adherence: can a spoon full of resilience help the medicine go down? (open access, full paper freely available) by Dominic Furniss, Nick Barber, Imogen Lyons, Lina Eliasson and Ann Blandford. Dom and Ann are both on the CHI+MED project (Ann is both the Principal Investigator (PI) at the UCL site and PI of the CHI+MED project overall). BMJ Qual Saf doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2013-002276