Made up words in company communications

Garp

Garp

Garp

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,575
Location
Seattle
Had one of my pet peeves at work today, in the form of an e-mail from a customer that was originally sent to our second line support team, but got raised to the queue my department works on. The ticket was quite a reasonable ticket, one that needed investigated.. but what was irritating was the phrase "this appears to happen with no obvious patternation"
Patternation?! Why make up such a rubbish word? Its so.. well.. pretentious for a start, and makes the sender look like a muppet, particularly given the style of the rest of the e-mail. The style marked it out as obviously being from someone reasonably educated, capable of spelling and laying out communications properly, and yet they feel it necessary to put such a made up word as "patternation" in it?!

I can just about excuse badly spelt e-mails, though no-one should send an e-mail outside of a company without at least running it through a spell-checker in my opinion, but to start making up rubbish words to describe your issue when there is a perfectly decent word "pattern" that would do is just ludicrous.
 
I hate commercialese. :(

Patternation is possibly the worst example of invented terms that I've seen yet, but even real words like advise, as per, re and same are all horribly abused.
 
Worked for a boss who'd often ask me to "Pleave" my expenses on his desk, or to "Pleave" my job sheets.

It was his word for "Please Leave"
 
~J~ said:
Worked for a boss who'd often ask me to "Pleave" my expenses on his desk, or to "Pleave" my job sheets.

It was his word for "Please Leave"
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I hope you told him to "foff" or where to "sit" :D
 
He was probably confusing it with "Patination" which is an actual word, but which has no connection with the context of his made-up word.
 
My mate made up the word Fichang, which he said was the noise that your dooh dah made when you looked at the Kays catologue underwear section :p :p
 
Von Smallhausen said:
Or slap his faceration.
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Classic. Superb. A top-class Vonism.



Now does anybody have any bright ideas for getting orange juice out of the soft, perforated cream leather of my computer chair?
 
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ErNciLator said:
but

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=patternation&fr=FP-tab-web-t400&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

:( ouch sry, that sucks eh?
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http://www.freesearch.co.uk/dictionary/patternation

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/patternation

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Patternation

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/patternation.html

and finally most importantly, the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://www.askoxford.com/results/?v...570&textsearchtype=exact&sortorder=score,name

He might want it to exist, but patternation is not a real word. Its just one come up with by pretentious fools trying to look smarter than they really are, and of higher class because the word "pattern" sounds too common.
 
We had a conference call a year or so ago with some Americans, one of which stated "let's take that idea and fly it up the flag pole" :confused: Didn't understand the guy, didn't help when he started suffixing random words with "ize" and suggesting we "park that idea in the car park for a while..".
 
It's a nice colour.. but I don't like it.

Ok, what colour would you like to see it in.

Hmmm.. how about redblue.

Red and blue. ok

No. redblue.

Redblue?

Yes.

... but... what's redblue? Purple?

No, that's red and blue mixed together. Redblue is a colour.

No it isn't. Send me the value for it.

How?

*brief explanation how to extract the colour with the eyedropper in photoshop

#A800FF

Yeah ok. That's not purple.

See

I was being sarcastic. It's purple.

No it isn't

Look, you can't argue against colours. It's purple ask anybody in your office.

Ok I've asked a few people. Ok so it might be purple, but it's also called redblue.

Ok.

:D
 
phone the sender up/go and visit him/her and really loudly ask "This workd youve put in the ticket you sent, what exactly does it mean because me and all the lads in the office have been trying to figure it out and can't!!"

This should put a stop to any future made up words :D
 
When it comes to excessive use of the english language there one person who sets the benchmark which others can only hope to reach. That man is one Ron Dennis, CEO of McLaren international. To see just how good he is head over to pitpass.com and try the Ronspeak Translator
 
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