Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Wee Scottish Laddie

For reasons which are irrelevant to this blog I was just looking at a web-page of the University of Edinburgh. The page instructs wee Scottish students how to use an American software which students sometimes use, stage by weary stage. Instruction line number 9 states, and I quote in unabridged form:
On the wee window labelled PubMed (NLM) which pops up, select Yes to save changes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oh how I would have loved such detailed instructions in the early days of computer use in the office when all those smart technicians with no knowledge of administration whatsoever constantly got away with claiming that all was the stupid user's fault and if only all those users could be gotten rid off who didn't meet the savvy-standards of the know-it-all guys the world would be able to progress to Shangri-La or a screwdriver wielding guy's equivalent thereof.

and in a way it persists to this day as I notice again and again that those writing instructions tend to haughtily assume that they do not have to stick to one choice of word for one thing but that readers better know all the alphabet soup synonyms they can come up with. After all that's the minimum one can expect in the 21st century can't one? Easy step by step instructions are for knitters and crocheteers and readers of dead tree stuff and others similarly uneager for mental challenges.

in this case it is really nice that one is told in advance in unmisunderstandable language that one will have be asked whether one wants to save

Silke