... I just play one in real life.
So. Out here in the boonies , surrounded by man-eating spiders , spider-eating snakes, man-eating sharks and shark-eating crocs (shut up, Henry), an internet connection is a very good thing.
For one, it lets you scare your relatives.
For another, because the postmen are too terrified of the birdlife to do anything useful it means that we have access to all the journals and stuff that people in more civilized (or at least, less convict-ridden) places take for granted.
And when we don’t have online access to a journal, there is a rather splendid Document Delivery Service whereby one can fill in a form on the library website, after which the obedient trolls
highly-skilled librarians talk nicely to the people at the British Library and one finally (quite rapidly, actually — in about 3 days) receives a scanned photocopy (yes, I know) of the relevant article (in black and white, which makes my inner cell-biologist cry but I’m not going to quibble over that. Yet).
But the thing that made me bang my head against the table this morning was (remember that we are talking about a library here) the email containing the sentence
To retrieve your document, go to [url] and enter your email address as the login and the following PIN number
A personal PIN number, presumably. Like the sort you might use in the automated ATM machines.
Richard – though subject to bursts of pedantry myself, I can almost see a justification for PIN number. Consider the statement:
ENTER A PIN
Is it asking you to type in a number or stick in a pointy thing? But then
ENTER A PI NUMBER
leaves you trying to find the decimal place button and remember one of those mnemonics for pi
... so I, for one, am prepared to let them get away with it. Just this once. With a doctor’s note.
What I didn’t add, Brian, is that it wasn’t even a number. There were letters in it too.
The last time I looked in the UK we also had this service, described as ‘electronic retrieval’. Only problem is that you when online, filled out a form, and then had to print out the form and walk it across to the library. Why? Well they obviously had to have a signature…
Oh yes, you are.
The pedants of this world do it a great service.
All hail pedantry.
(Plus it’s cute to see them get so irritated.)
Quote from a pedantic reviewer of one of my pubs:
“Page 3, line 4: PCR Reaction is illiterate. Remove it.”
:D
Brooks> Lovely. Guess you should have written “a PC reaction” with all its implications…. ;)
Richard> password? secret code? [my personal favourite – especially when several people have the same secret code…]
I guess you could say something about the whole thing “no-one really knows what it stands for so therefore we might as well make it a ‘real’ word and not write it with capitals”. Imagine that, a new word :)
I’m not a pedant
Ha!
Anyway…
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Department of Redundancy Department recently. In our last grant application, almost every occurrence of a particular acronym had its last word repeated. The acronym was the whole point of the grant (it’s in the title), so I’ve been giving many thanks to the word processor gods for find and replace.
Some amount of redundancy in language functions as useful error correction mechanism(s). I recognize that among those I am
speakingwriting to are editors who have their owninscrutableidiosyncraticbizarreLovecraftianByzantinewhimsviews of how scientific papers should be written in the lingua franca that is Scientific English.The goal of a scientific paper should be to convey to the reader the data and scientific concepts encompassing that data with clarity and economy. The largest cost by far in that process is the time that readers spend reading the paper. It is a false economy to conserve a few lines of text if it costs the readers a few seconds longer to understand the concepts without ambiguity.
When a readers’ first language is not English or the more widely understood American, the redundancy of the term “PIN number” may provide a useful clue as to what the term actually means. If Nature editors of times past had allowed writers to put more redundancy in the writing, Maxine’s
thanklessAugeantask of creating a hierarchical keyword index might be easier.