Re: Lingua Franca Today

[Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

"kelley" <kwalker2 -at- gte -dot- net> 

> it's not a technical document. we;ve had this debate on the list
frequently 
> enough. not all of us write user help manuals, nor do we write software 
> documentation. as i explained elsewhere, our clients actually pay for
the 
> writing we do for them _because_ it is literate and makes cultural 
> references in "flowery" language. this particular project is more akin
to 
> science journalism like the kind Sharon Begley of Newsweek writes. It's 
> more like journalism, i suppose. Begley, of course, uses words like
enmity 
> and opprobrium when other words would certainly do.

Well, like I said, considering that 1/3 of your readers did not know what
it meant, it seems pretty obvious that it is a bad choice of words. 

And just because Skip Snooty of The Weekly Snob uses big
important-sounding words, doesn't mean you have "carte blache" to use them
as well. 

> oh, and btw, the phrase lingua franca was used recently in a security
focus 
> article, as someone pointed out offlist:
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lingua+franca+router
> 
> see, specifically: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/302

Haw haw...now I get it. You lifted a section of that Business Week
article. So now not only are you using flowery words (which are honestly
inappropriate for the article as well) but you're also just ripping off
text from articles. 

Quote from "Toward More Cybersecurity", by Alex Salkaver: "When a company
sends data from New York to New Dehli across the networks of AT&T, France
Telecom, and others, all the routers speak BGP -- moving traffic easily
without misrouting or losing it."

Which sounds a lot like your: "When a company needs to move information
from Manhattan to Milan in the click of a mouse, routers speak BGP to one
another in order to move network traffic without losing it. "

Both of you have mis-explained BGP. Thus demonstrating one of the most
fundamental problems in many technical documents. the writer did not
understand the material and tried to compensate for this by merely
dressing up other people's text. 

The problem with dressing up information you don't comprehend, is that you
run the risk of obfuscating the real concepts and alienating your
audience, which is apparently what happened to you. 

Andrew Plato 

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