"Delivering uncommon results in software culture"

IT and language

Way back when… I was taking a class in Artificial Intelligence as an emphasis in my degree program. Of course, back then, we were still struggling with the inability of natural language processing to distinguish between: “time flies like the wind” and “fruit flies like bananas.”

Oddly, while SyFy had already dealt with flies in transporter machines, fruit and wind were never broached. I do hope that’s been resolved.

My A.I. professor, whose first language was not English, gave us a speech one day about how appalled he was at the general level of spelling in our industry – specifically his University department. He was disgruntled with the high incidence of simple spelling and grammatical errors from people he considered academic and therefore setting of higher examples.

His explanation was anecdotal but insightful. He had entered the field of A.I. and after a number of years noticed in himself a decreased ability to quickly and correctly pull simple rules of spelling and grammar; they had been eroded and replaced with the language and syntax of programming. He surmised that there must be one part of the brain dedicated to language in general and filling it with new constructs was at the expense of the old.

Having said that, however, it’s always curious to me that some grade school basics still present themselves as constant problems. After tens of thousands of emails read in my career, the words that still seem to cause confusion are homonyms. [insert your own joke here.]

These are words that sound the same – but are NOT interchangeable – or at least not to professional consultants. Unfortunately, spell checkers will not typically find these for you – you have to make the effort yourself.

Here is a very short list of words I have collected over the years, which for whatever reason seem to still cause confusion:

  • Bases, basis
  • They’re, their, there.
  • Then, than
  • Your, you’re
  • Of, off
  • To, too (much), two
  • Setting around, sitting around
  • Here, hear, hair
  • Bear, bare, beer
  • Across, acrossed

 

As an IT professional, take the time to know these differences; writing professionally simply adds to your credibility.

About the Author
I’ve had the good fortune to travel and work internationally. I’ve also had the good fortune to have grown up in New Zealand and have lived the American “immigrant experience” for more than half of my life. I’ve also had an unorthodox musical journey that led me to and kept me in Kansas City. Music, IT and travel became partners along the way helping me appreciate multiple worldviews and the concepts of cross-disciplinary approaches to life and work. My non-conventional experiences reflect my meanderings about this interesting occupational field. The beauty of having been in IT for 30 years is that our solutions become predictably cyclic while our problems remain the same. Culture is a topic I’m rather obsessive about. I firmly believe that it will help to usher in a renaissance in American business – oddly enough in the hands of IT.

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