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.

Stock photos - I wonder what future 'archaeologists' will make of them

A couple of weeks ago I wondered in a few tweets the following thoughts...

"Is there any academic literature on stock photos? I'm aware of amusing curations (women laughing alone with salad etc) but also curious about the interesting linguistic thingmes it brings up when you search for a word or phrase and it brings up unexpected stuff. I always find myself wondering about any future info-archaeologists and what they might make of how we see things / ourselves, through stock images ;)"

Flickr picture credits: Left: Kidney with 'omnions' by duncan, Middle: kidney medium by Yersinia, Right: Kidney stones by Trevor Blake

Previously, I wrote about this sort of thing in terms of a picture representing an idea (or more literally a word) and how this had sparked some creative fun at work...

"Years ago I helped the then editor of our research magazine (Research Matters, from Diabetes UK) find some illustrative images to go with short summaries of our various bits of research. I remember in particular looking for things that conveyed 'kidneys' to match the section on our kidney research.

There are some standard-issue visual tropes for kidneys, including pictures of actual kidneys (either photographs or drawings, including the urinary system), kidney-shaped metal dishes, kidney beans and even, if you're so minded, steak and kidney pies.

But the concept of kidneys can also be put across by images of clear water - after all the job of the kidneys is to filter and clean blood, and conserve things that the body wants to keep. Even the concept of a fuse might be used in relation to the role the kidneys play in blood pressure and how this can damage them. You might even get away with 'balance' in that our kidneys keep everything in order.

I found that being in the role of someone who picks the pics made me think much more laterally about images in general, which I'm sure is all to the good."
Source: Building the picture pipeline - free images for use in healthcare and medical research #scicomm #nhssm (Sunday, 20 May 2012)

Picking up on the last point there it also crossed my mind that selecting images for an article (and thinking laterally about words, phrases and what the images say) is a teeny, tiny bit like being a film music composer, in the sense that you're 'writing to text' (as opposed to 'writing to picture' as in film) and can choose to use a straightforward image that's clearly aligned to the text (perhaps equivalent of using happy music in a happy scene, or sad music in a sad scene) or selecting something a little more obscure to highlight an aspect of the text that's perhaps not explicit.

Here's a lovely example of a piece of music matching something less obvious in the scene (and perhaps making it more obvious to the audience) -

"One of the classic examples of this kind of [film music] writing is found in David Raksin's score to Force of Evil discussed in some detail in chapter 3. In the final scene the main character, Joe (John Garfield), is seen running in the street, then along a great stone wall and down a huge flight of stairs. Yet the music here is not "running" music -- Raksin has scored the emotional rather than the physical character of the scene. Joe has been running, figuratively, throughout the film; it is only now, as he begins the search for his dead brother's body, that he finds any sort of quietude. Raksin reflects this psychological point in his slow music for this sequence."
Source: Roy A Prendergast The Aesthetics of Film Music (mystery online PDF)

Further reading
I like the genre of reframing of pictures, in the contextual 'caption competition' sense rather than actual frames. Here are a couple of examples I've noticed recently that have amused me.

44 Medieval beasts that cannot even handle it right now Buzzfeed (28 August 2014)

“We’re Fine Here, How Are You?” Normal Moments In Art History Where No One Is About To Get Murdered The Toast (16 June 2014) - features art nudes and so, depending on your workplace, this one might not be safe for work.