TechTermsThatGetYouHauledIntoHr

Technical terms or phrases that risk getting you sent to the HumanResources office:

• "Fiddle with her front-end"
• "We'll try it with the master-slave positions reversed"
• "Mother's died. Steve's just gone to boot her" I still don't get it.
  • Interpretation 1: The machine we call Mother has crashed and Steve has gone to restart it.
  • Interpretation 2: My Mother has died, and Steve has gone to kick her when shes lying there dead.
  • This falls into the general set of examples because the first is legitimate technical language, the second is unacceptable to society.

If Mother was a cantankerous old b*tch it is unlikely that anyone, with even the most delicate of sensibilities, would fault Steve for his actions. Mother, the machine... of course.

• "Fork the child, let it sleep for a few hours, and then kill it when you're done."
• "She's got a nice .profile."
• "I tried finger-ing her, but got no response."
• "She goes down on me at least once a week."

Some of these don't work very well if you refer to the computer as "it", not "she".

Serial devices under Unix originally interfaced to Teletypes, abbreviated "tty" (e.g. /dev/tty), and once upon a time fairly universally pronounced "Titty" (both within and without the Unix world, I believe).

Pseudo-ttys (virtual serial devices) are still an important mechanism, although the physical Teletypes are long gone. Do people still say "Pseudo-Titty", or has everyone carefully shifted to the safer "Pseudo-TEE-TEE-WHY"?

TEE-TEE? WHY?

Hm. Never heard it called anything but T-T-Y, personally. -- MartinZarate

In the mid-eighties, a woman graduate student who I worked with got very offended by our use of "titty" and asked us, rather angrily, to stop. -- TomStambaugh