Pylimitics

There’s a lot of talk about “dashboards” in the business world today. Everybody wants a dashboard presenting a summary of relevant information. Some software products are, to users, dashboards. The ready analogy, of course, is the dashboard in an automobile. It also occurs to me that as manufacturers switched from analog gauges to electrical indicators… Continue reading

There’s an old saying “up a creek without a paddle.” It means you’re in trouble — maybe fairly serious difficulty. You’ll sometimes see a shorter version, “up a creek,” which means the same thing. But you’ll only hear this expression in the US (or possibly in Australia and New Zealand), where a “creek” is a… Continue reading

When you’re “fond” of something or someone, it’s a feeling of affection or liking. Most people don’t think that’s “foolish or stupid,” but that’s where the word “fond” comes from. Its origin is in the Middle English word “fonnen,” which was a verb meaning “to be stupid” or “to make a fool of someone.” If… Continue reading

If a sailor pulled up his anchor only to discover that one of the flukes had snagged a big fluke, they would probably dismiss it as just a fluke. But the real fluke would, of course, be that the sailor had inadvertently encountered all three English words that are “fluke” in the course of a… Continue reading

In the computing field there’s a word: “kludge.” It’s mysterious in a couple of ways. It means a solution to a problem — usually a software solution — that’s clumsy, thrown together, and inelegant, but works anyway (at least for the moment).  The first mystery about “kludge” is how it’s spelled. The word is generally… Continue reading

Everything that’s on sale is for sale, but not everything for sale is on sale. It hasn’t always been that way. If you go back far enough — say to the 700s — “sell” meant to give. You can find it in Beowulf, and that’s what it meant in those days.  A couple of centuries… Continue reading