Nixta Sinks

It looked as bad as it sounded

Eastern Europe has always had thrillingly misspelled menus. When I say always, I mean since they started writing them in English, which was before I was born, and consequently is as close as I could give a monkey's to always. You'd best take a look at the whole menu. I should add that this particular food emporium was particularly foul on the outskirts of a horrible pathetic leper-colony of a village. Why were we there? Culture (and not the kind found in the small intestine). Stone walls in Ston.

Labels: Croatia, food, language

Words are rapidly losing their impact. This is something that appears to have caught on in the UK now, but when I first moved to the US over ten years ago the gap was very noticeable indeed. It ties in with not carrying a large enough vocabulary to be able to avoid ascribing multiple meanings to individual words, or to modify existing words into new forms. To Office was a new verb to me in August 1996, and I still cannot help but cringe when I encounter it as a verb. Note, I'm not implying that Americans *cannot* carry a large vocabulary, but they often choose not to (whether they're conscious of that choice or not). After all, a word that serves 10 purposes is easier to master than 10 words that serve one each. Like totally gnarly, dude.

By extension then, some words have lost their meaning to a great extent. They are either diluted by additional meaning to the point where no meaning carries much weight, or other words have encroached upon them to the point where they become less favoured to the alternatives available to express a point.

To Office is a weird one though, largely because it's so damned fuzzy that I can't even describe what it means. Although it probably is supposed to mean something like photocopying, stapling, filing and typing, it could easily include watering plants, spinning on chairs, e-mailing the day away, pinning things onto cubicle walls, dozing in the disabled toilets and so on and so forth (and perhaps for that reason it only took off fleetingly into the winds of common usage before being shot down by the poisoned lead buckshot of the common-sense-canon) [forgive my metaphors - half of them are similes anyway, but I've drooled it out now].

I was reminded of one of these devalued and confused words yesterday during a Best Buy commercial. The word "pledge" seems to have become confused. Very confused. It implies (or ought to) a heartfelt and voluntary compulsion. It's a deeply personal commitment. Like the Pledge Of Allegiance - you know, for kids; something that can really get you killed. Yet we're expected to believe that a Best Buy employee will make a pledge that will benefit us somehow, and that we should shop there as a result? It's a marketing ploy we see so much that we have become inured to it and its use is no more than background noise or filler to us now. The 'bof', 'er', 'um' or 'like' of advertising.

Beta get a bucket

Another more ubiquitous example online is the use of "beta" (or "alpha" or in the case of Flickr even "gamma"). That most likely has legal basis, sadly (as most despicable things do).

Google is a fantastic proponent of early-adoption mass-user-based releases with a superb test team as a result. After all, you can't user-acceptance-test software better than through the actual user-base. That's what a beta product has always been for, after all. But Google's (pre-King) Prince Midas touch has changed what beta software means.

For example, can you fairly charge for a beta product (which is what Flickr do)? Trillian did it, I seem to recall (and they didn't listen to their users and turned a decent product into an unusable fuck-up). Google seem to be the worst transgressors (though they don't charge) and they make up for it with rapid development and rollout cycles, but as a result of the obvious slackening in the levels of service concomitant with a beta "product" even graphics card companies throw "beta" into any driver less than a year old so that they can get away without providing decent support and can get on with losing the pixel race.

Notice that the products Google has bought have suffered less at the hand of the Betabug: Picasa and Google Sketchup for example. Google Earth is still beta though [sigh] and Blogger went *back* to beta when it was bought (though it's now out again). At least that bane of modern humanity and social interaction, Friendster, is no longer beta (they may have started the whole thing). In contrast, Yahoo's purchases of Flickr and Jumpcut hasn't pulled them from betaland yet, but again Flickr continues to innovate and improve rapidly because it *is* beta.

Beta software has gone therefore from a piece of software that is pre-release and for the use of a select few, to mainstream with bugs for the sake of rapid featureset rollout. With Flickr I don't pay a price for a finished product. I pay a price for bandwidth to the application and so my point must be that the meaning of "beta" has changed even though I don't doubt that it's tacked onto the product name (GMail, GTalk, GoogleEarth, Flickr, JumpCut) under its old guise.

Here's a perfect beta mashup: Running a transport system in beta mashed up with singing about it in beta (better copy here).

Beta song about beta trains

And why had I never heard of JumpCut? Superb.

In the same way that we have given up on words, we've given up on dance. Thank you, G Boy - Sorry I missed this. Golden moment at 1:55 for those that can't be arsed to wait and learn (have you given up on patience too?). Since this came from memepool, about half of you (that would be G Boy and The Doc) will have seen this a hundred times already, but I ain't apologisin'. Our whole lives should be paced out and interspersed with disco lighting. I'm sure mine used to be when I was very small.

Golden moment starts at 1:55 - do it, kids

Labels: beta, corruption, language