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JoeN's Blog

XNA Shaman
Stop the Madness - Tabify, Untabify, Uniqueify, Winningest, Undefeateds

OK - I've had enough of the made up words and spelling madness. Like most people I make up words sometimes but it is getting out of control - in life, on Sports Center, and in Visual Studio.

I'm not the world's best speller but sometimes you need to hold the line. Here's the latest round of made up words that have driven me crazy:

  • Tabify, Untabify. These options are on the Edit.Advanced menu and allow users to effectively swap tabs for spaces etc. I'm amazed that we didn't also change the rest of the options on this menu so they read something along the lines of: Uppercasify, Lowercasify, Indentify, Unindentify.
  • Uniqueify. This one I caught during a Visual Studio meeting where a member of the VS project team was talking about creating unique names for projects when they get created (you know the endless WindowsApplcation256, WindowsApplication257 etc). This is how it was used: “So after we uniqueify the project name...”
  • Winningest. This was my all time favorite from Sports Center (until the one below). This is usually used when people want to describe a coach how has the most wins in their career - he is the “winningest“ coach of all time at X school etc.
  • Undefeateds. My new all time personal favorite - this was the headline on Sports center talking about basketball teams that haven't been defeated yet in the current season. This was the title as they started to talk about the different teams.

Of course coming from Australia it took me a long time to get used to the “American“ dictionary - especially the small change of taking the s's out of words and replacing them with z's (organise becomes organize etc). I found this pretty annoying when I first came and didn't correct my email's etc. A few of the people that I worked with noticed and commented about it - saying “Didn't the spell checker pick that up?“ I had to tell them that I had secretly added my favorite words to the American dictionary so I wasn't nagged as much :-)

Oh and because I've been informed that it's “bad form” to have an entry without a link - here's something that I tend to use on daily basis  http://www.dictionary.com

 

Posted: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 10:53 AM by JoeN
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Comments

Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium said:

# January 27, 2004 7:47 PM

Alan McBee said:

somewhat OT: Did you know that both the MSN toolbar (http://toolbar.msn.com/), and the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), have built in links to dictionaries? MSN's takes you to (natch) Encarta, and Google's to dictionary.com.

Happy logophiling! (YAMUW[1])(http://www.opinions3.com/logophile.htm)

[1] Yet Another Made Up Word
# January 27, 2004 8:21 PM

John Sands said:

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. (from the Simpsons).
# March 14, 2004 7:10 AM

Mahavir said:

Loved reading your Blogs ! :) All the best to your Son also :)
# May 26, 2004 2:30 AM

dianying xia zai said:

# July 26, 2004 12:35 AM
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