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Re: I had say it because I was afraid no one else would.
Subject:Re: I had say it because I was afraid no one else would. From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Sun, 1 Feb 2009 11:08:07 +0900 (WST)
Merriam-Webster has an entry for "fraudster", but even if
it were a made-up word, your company has every right to
invent it and the product manager is entitled to make sure
that its usage in your manual and the marketing material
reinforce each other.
You could argue on TW grounds that the word itself is
unclear or inappropriate, but once management has decided
that's the term they like, the manuals have to follow suit.
You need to be pulling on the same end of the rope as the
rest of the company.
"Frauds" is a tricky term because it describes both the act
and the person who commits it. For that reason I would
prefer to have separate words. Made-up example:
"Click FraudCount to display the number of frauds detected
in the last reporting period."
Does this report show the number of fraud-people or the
number of fraud-acts (i.e. scumbags or rip-offs)? There's
no easy way to tell.
Stuart
Steven Jong wrote:
> I worked at a company that sold services that identified frauds,
> that is, people who try to defraud companies. The input material
> called them "fraudsters," a made-up word, and I changed it to
> "frauds," which is a real English word that means precisely what
> we wanted to call them.
>
> The product manager reviewed the manual and changed all
> instances of "frauds" to "fraudsters," and insisted on the jargon
> term. Why? Because we (the company) had used the word in
> industry presentations, and wanted to establish it as the
> industry term for frauds. We wanted, um, mindshare.
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