Forbes.com: The most painfully annoying business jargon.

My favorite:

“Break Down Silos”

These days, when executives talk about increasing communication within their company and getting one department to talk to another without persnickety protocols getting in the way, they talk about “breaking down silos.” One of many problems with this painful expression: “There are no silos in New York,” says Jason Morely, who is working on a master’s thesis at New York University that examines deceptive forms of corporate communication. “I hear people use that phrase and I ask them what they think a silo is only to find out they don’t know.”

You know what’s funny about that? There probably are silos in New York. Not in New York City, obviously, but upstate. They do have farms there. Dairy farms, even.

Junk the Jargon
Communication competition for postdoctoral researchers

In January, I am a judge in the final of “Junk the Jargon”, a new competition for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at Queen Mary University, designed to encourage academics to better communicate their research. Modelled on famelab, this is an excellent initiative and I am very pleased to be part of it.

The competition will be held in each Graduate School in January, and successful participants will go through to the final, held on Wednesday 27th January, from 5pm. Anyone not participating in the competition is encouraged to come and watch and support the finalists. A drinks reception will be held afterwards. Prizes of £500, £250 and £100 will be awarded for the top three presentations.

I have been following, or at least trying to follow, the Copenhagen climate talks ever since it began nearly two weeks ago.

Wading through the viscous stream of jargons, I tried to make sense of the developments or the lack of it at the Danish capital, going through the news reports generated by the media every day.

The coverage, in the paper I work for and elsewhere, reminded me of the story of the blind men trying to figure out what an elephant looks like.

Each newspaper or news agency appeared to have a different take on what was brewing inside the Bella Centre in Copenhagen. Except for spot reports, little else bore any resemblance to each other. “It’s like a wall”, “a thick rope”, no “it’s like a tree trunk” they all seemed to say.

Only one thing was clear — Copenhagen was very cold, like the vibes between the rich, poor and the richer developing countries.

Late on Friday night, came the news that PM Manmohan Singh & US President Barack Obama deferred their return at the request of UN general secretary Ban Ki Moon to thrash out a deal.

Still later in the night or early on Saturday morning the news of some kind of a deal filtered in. Reports said the US had arrived at a “meaningful agreement” with the key developing countries like India, China and Brasil.

The said “deal” is not legally binding and does not talk of any carbon reduction target or any “peaking” deadline — in short it has every thing that the key “interested parties” wanted.

Hardly matters that many of the developing countries reportedly did not even know that there was such an agreement when it was being announced by the American representative.

To sum up, this is what a Green Peace official told the BBC on the last night of the summit: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport.”

I hadn’t heard of this word , till I read it in The Hindu this morning . Which doesn’t mean that the word doesn’t exist.  In fact,  ‘incentivise’  is a word coined in 1968  and is recognised  in OED and Merriam-Webster.  But then a Google search showed up this entry under Urban Dictionary , which said the only respectable form of the word was the noun “incentive.”  And it added that those who say  “incentivize”  ought to know they  ‘come across as a jargon-spewing a-hole’.

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2009 is “un-friend”.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

It was a bit of an average list, and I think “un-follow” is more deserving, but their reasoning is:

“Unfriend is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

I’m liking that term “lex-appeal”!

Street art in Perth, pic by creativespark

British Journal of Healthcare Management 2009 (Volume 15 Issue 12) Contents Page

Fade Fave: Productive, efficient cost savings

Fade Skinny: Professor John Appleby, chief economist of the King’s Fund, discusses productively efficient cash-releasing cost minimising savings, or the jargon that no-one understands.

(Print copy held at the Fade Library)

Now that you are living in Bs As you MUST learn this so-called “slang” called lunfardo. However, lunfardo is much more than just a type of jargon – since EVERYONE now uses it in every day language (once upon a time it was only used by tango singers and the lower classes – those who developed it).  Enough said, get started with these:

che: an interjection often used to get someone’s attention (“hey, you!”); also very commonly used between sentences as a segue

colectivo: bus — here “autobus” is not used; not technically lunfardo (the lunfardo name is bondi)

pibe: muchacho in the rest of LA

plata: money (literally “silver”)

mina: mujer (woman)

laburar: trabajar (to work)

morfar: comer (to eat)

quilombo: a hectic situation, or a mess (“Llegué tarde porque el tránsito es un quilombo hoy”  – I arrived late because traffic is terrible today.)

boludo/a: dumb or stupid (when used literally); however, often used among friends affectionately

pelotudo/a: idiot, dumbass — somewhat similar to boludo, but much stronger!

We were talking last time about jargon and the way it clutters up your writing, getting in the way of the message. But sometimes jargon is just very very funny.

I have to confess a weakness for daft language, although you do have to be careful. People might just take you seriously. Here’s my top ten :

1. Multi-slacking. Multi-skilling and multi- tasking’s lazy brother.
2. Wet signature. Strangely off-putting way of referring to a hand fashioned signature.
3. Strategic staircase. A plan for the future as opposed to some  fortuitously placed steps.
4. Alpha geek. Head of tech support.
5. Blame Storm. Trying to work out who’s going to get it.
6. Power Loser. The person chosen in number 5.
7. Idea hamster. Person least likely to be fired in a blame storm due to their constant stream of ideas.
8. Long pole item. Pivotal, like the pole in an old-fashioned tent.
9. Glasgow salad. Chips (one for UK readers I think.)
10. Going postal. Losing it big style.

Once again many thanks to  www.rhymer.net and www.johnsmurf.com of MBA Jargonwatch  for some of their ideas.

Please choose one from each list:

Hand Made

Hand-made

Handmade

and then there’s this one:

Wheel Thrown

Wheel-thrown

Wheelthrown

I have seen and used all versions of all of these.  I have a nagging need in the back of my skull for consistency.  Help me decide!

What’s the worst bit of nonsense you’ve heard when doing calls in the morning? Until this week, my favourite was when North West Ambulance Service used to say: “No, it’s all medical” when asked if anything had happened over night.

West Midlands Ambulance Service, however, served up this piece of nonsense-speak when giving out details of the death of a man who had been hit by a train:

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: “When crews arrived they found a train that had stopped near by to the spot where the man’s body was found.  He had suffered injuries incompatible with life.”

In other words, he was already dead when the paramedics arrived. Injuries incompatible with life? Who invents these phrases? And perhaps more importantly, why didn’t someone in the press office/communications department at the ambulance service not pick up on it?

The press release goes on:

“The train driver was checked out; he was not injured but was understandably shaken by the incident.  The passengers’ wellbeing was also checked but no-one required any assistance.”

Passengers’ wellbeing was also checked? Would ‘Passengers were also checked for injuries’ not have done the job just as well? But at least that piece of jargon isn’t quite as offensive as the “Injuries incompatible with life” reference.  How would you feel if you read that your relative had “injuries incompatible with life”?

The Sunday Mercury reported the quotes in full on its website - and quite right too. If that’s all the information the ambulance service put out, it shouldn’t be up to the media to change quotes.

If you look at the news page of the ambulance website, something else a little odd stands out. If a pedestrian is injured by a car, the headline is Car v Pedestrian while another update, while a car colliding with a lorry is marked up as Car v Lorry. I know there’s a bit of a backlash on against SEO at the moment, but surely there is some mistake here.

All in all, is West Midlands Ambulance Service suffering from jargon diarrhea incompatible with plain English?

(NB: Hat-tip to Ross Hawkes of The Lichfield Blog for mentioning this first on Twitter).

Author: Toni Bowers

I read somewhere that the best way to judge a job candidate’s technical knowledge is to ask him or her to explain a technical concept in layman’s terms.  That sounded like a very simple statement at the time, but I have to admit that there’s a lot of truth to it.

Think about the best teacher you ever had in school — it was probably a person who introduced you to complex concepts by first relating them to something you could readily relate to or understand.  Now, of course, you can argue that, as an IT pro, your job is not to teach people (unless you’re in the training sector).

But you do have to be able to put your theoretical know-how into real work.  When an interviewer asks you to explain a technical topic like you would to a non-IT person, what he is looking for is if you can see how technical tools and practices relate to the business as a whole.   You can’t sell technology to end-users and executives unless you can effectively explain to them why it is needed.

On a broader scale, this is a form of IT/business alignment — a term you’ve heard so many times in the last decade that it has become jargon-ish.  But it is important, and potential employers are looking to see if you have the ability to understand the business and translate technology to shareholders. 

In a blog I wrote last year, I recommended analogies that can be used to explain complex concepts.  Be sure to read the member comments following the piece for some great examples of analogies that work.  [Source:  http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=1575&tag=nl.e175]

Author: Toni Bowers

All the IT career resources harp on building communication skills and avoiding jargon.  But how do you get around explaining technology without using technical terms?

——————————————————————————————————————-

I got a great e-mail the other day from a TechRepublic member.  He (correctly) stated that all the IT career advice out there tells you to work on communication skills — specifically how to keep the tech-speak out of your conversations with stakeholders and end users — but nobody tells you how to do that.  From the e-mail:

“I, and almost every tech I know, has a difficult time trying to explain their points without getting engrossed in the detail and/or tech-speak.  There is nothing that is more dissatisfying within my own career than trying to convince upper management of a solution that we need, especially one they ask for, and find that even at my best, I eventually lose them.  I make a concerted effort to avoid technical terminology but the main decision makers in my company have a condition where their eyes roll into the back of their heads as soon as they hear the word computer, except for when broken is the next word in the sentence.

You and others like you often advise not using tech speak when trying to explain a problem or situation.  But no one seems to be able to guide people like me in the right practical direction on what to use.”

If there is a secret to communicating technical information to the non-technical, it is the use of analogy (a form of communication in which one topic is explained in terms of another, more familiar topic that is similar in a certain respect).  In other words, when you need to explain a technical issue, do it in terms of something that falls more into the listener’s experience of everyday life.

It’s a fact that someone can understand a new piece of information if it can be explained in terms of information that person has already acquired and used.  You see a lot of analogy used in court cases when experts are explaining medical evidence to a jury.  I use it a lot when speaking to my teenaged son.

Analogies can be used on an everyday basis, as in explaining to an end user why he can’t access secure Web sites.  You could say, “If the cipher strength of your browser is inadequate, you will not get into secure Web sites.”   I can tell you right now that that will mean nothing to the average end user.  Instead, you can say that not having proper encryption means that that person has security clearance to enter a building but may not be able to get into all areas. In order to do that, he needs to “upgrade his security clearance status” (adjust the encryption).  And then show him how to do that.  A file allocation table can be compared to a library card catalogue. IP addresses can be compared to phone numbers — for one phone to communicate with another, both must have unique numbers in the phone system.  If a user asks why his browser is running slow, you compare it to a busy highway.  Too many users are using the service — that’s like too many cars on a road at rush hour.

Analogies can also be used in higher-level situations, such as the one you describe when you’re trying to sell an executive on a new initiative. They’re even more useful in those situations since you usually have some lead time and can think about some creative metaphors or similes.  [Source:  http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=442&tag=content;leftCol]

ERA, or Earned Run Average is the most commonly used measure for a pitcher’s propensity to give up runs. It is displayed as the number of runs given up per nine innings pitched and is calculated by taking the totally number of earned runs a pitcher has given up and dividing it by the total number of innings pitched. This number is then multiplied by 9 to give the average of 9 innings. It only counts “earned runs” meaning that runs given up as a result of a batter reaching base via an error, or runs given up after an error fails to end an innings are discounted. It is part of the pitching triple crown.

Whereas batting average was one of the first statistics that I was able to get my head around and understand, ERA was one that remained baffling for quite a while after I began to be acquainted with the various other intricacies of baseball. The main reason for this is probably due to the various complexities that are wrapped up within in. The first being that unlike batting average, which is a simple value/quantity calculation, ERA brings in the complication of doing it by innings as well. While this does not seem like it is especially confusing, it does add an extra layer to the onion of ERA that must be unwrapped before you get to the crisp centre of understanding.

The most difficult to peel of these layers is the idea of the unearned run. My first understanding of this was that unearned runs were those that were given up once the pitcher had been substituted for another pitcher. My belief was that they were unearned in that case because the pitcher himself had not actually given up those runs, it was a teammates fault and therefore they should not count towards making his own statistics worse. Of course I soon learnt that this was not the case, but that initial belief means that I still think it slightly unfair that a pitcher has runs counted against him once he has sat down in the dugout. (as evidenced by cameras inevitably cutting to a dejected-looking pitcher sat down on the bench once his replacement has given up vital runs that he left out on the bases) But equally I understand the reasoning behind the fact that he is still responsible for those men getting on base and so he should be held responsible for them reaching home plate.

The definition of an earned run is something that is still somewhat complicated, and is another way that makes ERA that bit more inaccessible than its offensive statistical counterpart batting average. While both hinge around the judgement of whether an occurence in the field is judged as an error or not, further judgement calls must be made for ERA that make it a more arguable stat.

The more simple part of the Earned Run rule is the idea that a batter who has reached base via an error would not count towards an pitcher’s earned run total if he comes round to score. The more contentious concept is that of discounting runs after an error has been made that could have brought an end to the inning. The problem with this is that by their nature, inning-ending outs are made in high-pressure situations, so the decision to gauge whether a missed out is an error is often highly subjective. The highest occurence of arguments over rulings of this sort come with one out when the error is part of a failed double-play. Aside from the very routine sort, double plays are often turned at high-speed and requiring precision on the part of all the fielders involved. If the double play fails to be turned then sometimes one person may see it as a bungled play, while another may just see it as a failed attempt to turn a difficult play.

Whereas batting average calls on errors may affect a single ruling as a hit or not, in ERA it is possible that a judgement call on earned or unearned runs can lead to multiple runs being either counted or not counted to a pitchers ERA. Because of this all of these intricacies, ERA may be the statistic that is most often discounted or overlooked out of all commonly used stats when looking in-depth at a player’s performance.

Looking at a player’s ERA during a season can also be fairly unhelpful as a measure of their performance. Specifically with relievers, one bad outing could leave them with a terrible-looking ERA weeks or months down the line even if they have performed well in the interim. Take a typical LOOGY. He usually comes in to pitch for only one or two outs. Because of this, if he comes into a game and for whatever reason gives up 4 or 5 runs, then because he does not pitch many innings at a time, it will take many many games of giving up few or no runs before he will be able to bring his ERA down.

Despite all these apparent problems, ERA remains a stat that follows around pitchers in the same way that AVG follows batters. It is a stat that fans are able to glance at next to their player and immediately get a vague idea of how they are performing. It becomes much more important as a career measure, as over a longer timeframe, all the various inflations and deflations will tend to even themselves out. So as a statistic its far from perfect, but then like bad calls by umpires and misplays and errors, it is the imperfections in sport that give us something to talk about.

I had other plans today but feel compelled instead to talk about jargon. I read a blog post yesterday from the Performancing website www.performancing.com entitled ‘Improve your blog’s brand by creating new jargon’

Yaro Starak argues that by creating new jargon for your niche you ‘ build(s) the perception that we are experts who know what we’re talking about.’

I think that is a really risky strategy:

• Firstly because according to the dictionary, jargon is not only words pertaining to a specific job or profession but can also be ‘unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing; gibberish.
• Secondly because you have to have a great deal of authority and charisma to get your followers to adopt a new piece of language. Seth Godin can get away with ‘purple cow’ because he is Seth Godin.

At best jargon just gets in the way of what you are trying to say, at worst it makes you look as if you are trying too hard. In certain professions some jargon is simply shorthand. My husband told me he had recently received an e-mail saying, ‘If you do this, the dog will obscure the slate.’ That’s TV for you I’m afraid !

Some jargon makes me laugh and next time I am going to give you those as a top 10, but for now here are the ones I really hate.

1. Fit for purpose. Pejorative. Ubiquitous sound-bite phrase used to describe any government department/ or indeed anything that no longer functions as hoped.

2. Going forward. What’s wrong with in the future ?

3. Core competencies. What we do well ?

4. Woffice. An ill-conceived BBC idea of an individual  mini office that was wired for new technology.

5. Me plc. That’s just bad.

6. Facetime. Meeting ?

7. Leverage. Borrowed from finance and used just about everywhere.

8. Incentivize like Monetize. They are just made–up words.

9. Drill down. A cliché often applied to websites and the information found there.

10. ‘Own’ as in we must own the argument.

Many thanks to www.rhymer.net and www.johnsmurf.com for some of their jargon ideas.

Chris Yapp talking at the DAIN event

Compare the comment on the left with this:

“Our new focus will be to work to our strengths, allowing us to quickly identify and achieve on a primary goal. We all accept that it is a very competitive and fast-moving market, so if we are successful, we hope that our market will compare our superior performance against similar companies, rather than against companies that differ markedly from us.”

The first quote is a mix of recreational activity and fruit, while the second is a potentially potent soporific. They say the same thing, but which is the more effective?

The answer is: It depends on the audience!

The media and employees may well respond to the first quote, while market analysts and stockbrokers may respond to the second.

So is the use of jargon and clichés at the senior level in business appropriate?

Again, it depends. Analogies and metaphors work well in the commercial world because so much of what occurs in this environment is about persuasion.

Convincing people to your way of thinking is an essential skill in business, and the more senior you become, the more adept you will be at persuading individuals and groups, and vice versa.

Want to move to general management? Unless you possess strong persuasive skills, you are unlikely to make it.

So when does an effective and persuasive conversation or presentation risk being perceived as a meaningless string of clichés?

The definitions of the word ‘cliché’ seem to agree that a phrase becomes a cliché through overuse, resulting in the gradual loss of its original meaning.

Therefore the answer seems to be that the continual creation of new imagery when describing a business offering or solution, whether to a client or an internal project team, is an important function of persuasion.

We have a client whose executives constantly use analogies to present an image to their clients, who are mainly Australian subsidiaries of multinational corporations. This particular company provides professional services.

Amongst the pictures they use to illustrate their service is that their business is like a bus, with comparisons made between the direction of the bus and the direction of their organisation, about having the right people on board who can guide the bus in the right way.

It is a very well-known analogy from business author Jim Collins and his classic management bestseller “Good to Great”.

Is it an effective analogy?

Our client says yes, but because they are dealing with a broadly and well-educated client market themselves, there are limits as to how far the analogy should be taken:

“Collins’ imagery is perfect for quickly setting the scene, but we find it is very important for us to start speaking plain English about issues that are relevant to our client’s situation as quickly as possible, or we risk looking a bit wanky.”

The Australian business community does tend to revile against obvious US-derived business jargon. Nevertheless, much of it seems to have stuck around. Phrases commonly used in this country, such as

• create value
• going or moving forward
• paradigm shift

… along with hundreds of others, are phrases commonly used in general business conversations.

Interestingly, politicians also pick up on the jargon spoken in management circles, with Federal Minister for Sports and Recreation, Kate Ellis, in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, using the ‘moving forward’ and ‘ going forward’ cliché four times in a single sound bite!

Perhaps the simple ‘… this is what we plan to do’ makes a quick return.

And who could ever forget the Labor Party phrase ‘working families’ from the 2007 Federal Election?

Finally, every profession has its own jargon, with the obvious examples being the IT industry, medicine, of course, sports.

Comments such as “we are taking it one game at time”, and “it was game of two halves” and “this team are at sixes and sevens” are far from music to our ears nowadays, but it is arguable sportspeople are not paid to speak articulately, but to perform for their teams or themselves, so judging them on their articulation is a bit unfair.

Have a look here for a comprehensive list of sporting clichés.

People in the commercial world, however, are paid for their communications skills. It could be argued that most innovative ideas are meaningless unless someone can actually communicate the idea to an appropriate audience.

So, what’s the conclusion?

It seems that jargon will always be with us, but that the use of genuinely creative language is what unlocks audience understanding. However, as soon as that language is taken up by the majority of people in a particular sector or industry, it becomes increasingly ineffective as a tool of persuasion going forward. Sorry, I mean ‘as time progresses’.

Personally, I love a deliberate mixed metaphor to get an idea across. So at the risk of creating an instant cliché, allow me to summarise by saying:

The creative use of language in a commercial context ‘ain’t rocket surgery’. It just requires some thought.

It was all quiet in the cube farm and though there had been a few yelps from cube 6.7a, the whole prairie dogging thing had quietened down a bit. It would soon be time for the daily prayer meeting when the senior managers would need to give an account of their diaries for the next day, the deliverables they would hit and the like –  a kind of verbal action plan.

Life in the farm was deadly dull but it had its usual mix of people, quite apart from the giraffes, wildebeest and lions that swept majestically round the perimeter fences, taking – at least as far as Gerry the giraffe was concerned, a helicopter view of things – stock of the resources and how they were assimilating their customer focussed activities on the manual verbal communicators. Strategy; that was the name of the game these days and whether the customer service team members had realised it or not, they were the game that were being hunted to within an inch of their deliverables!

Lesley the Lion was your typical seagull manager: says she’s just passing and why doesn’t she just stop for a coffee but really she’s checking flight risk, doing a sense check and getting a heads up on anything that might come up at the next blamestorming meeting.

She dropped in to see Harry the Idea Hamster – he was in 5.6h. Harry was always first to get his ideas up when they were flipping during a thought shower, in fact once Harry got started on his idea wheel, it was pretty near impossible to get him shut up again. Just as he had got to idea 52, there was a hell of a racket emerged from 6.9c. Everyone got up and, papers in hand and pens at the ready, popped their heads up over the cubes, prairie dog style to see what was going on. Gerry was already there.

Natasha (or ’sha for short, sometimes shortened further to ’sh’) was getting engaged with her hardware. We all knew she had been pushing the envelope too hard for too long and in the run up to this morning’s episode, there had been telltale signs of malcontent: we thought it sounded like she was whacking the hell out of her keyboard but when I pinged her earlier she retorted, “keep your big nose out, I’m just doing some percussive maintenance. I’ll tell you more later but offline 8-)”. That was me told. Nicely.

Lesley left Harry still scribbling his ideas on his spiral notepad, and went to 6.9c. The cubes  went deathly quiet and the prairie dogs dropped silently to their desks and the tap-tap of the keys became the overwhelming noise in the cube farm. Everyone was online to each other trying to figure out what was going on. Gerry left 6.9c and went back to sweeping majestically.

“DON’T YOU DARE TRY TO SOCIALISE THIS ISSUE” was heard at fever pitch,”YOU ALWAYS SEEM TO THINK THAT THROWING IT AT THE WALL TO SEE WHAT STICKS WILL WORK EVERYTIME. THATS YOUR TROUBLE MISS BLOODY FfINKELSTEIN, WE’RE NOT BLOODY ANIMALS AND YOU CAN STICK YOUR SONGSHEET WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE”

The keyboards fell silent.

Total and utter silence.

‘Sha got up with her bag and marched out of 6.9c and towards the rest rooms.

Miss BloodyFfinkelstein stood up.

“Natasha Assmosis has been uninstalled”, she said. She picked up her manual portable verbal communicator and pressed a number or three. “Hello, Angie?, we have a free installation at 6.9c. See to it will you darling?”

And life in the cube farm went back to normal……

This is just my way of touching base with you to make sure we’re both in the same space right now as far as officespeak goes. At NGM we never use words you don’t understand or if we need to, we always explain what they mean so you do understand them for ever.

JohnF

So, I do a lot of glaze testing.  I still haven’t posted all the pictures I plan on posting, but it’s getting there.  But believe me, there are boxes of little pots and tiles with nasty avocado green and poo brown (for example) glazes on them littering our house.

One major hurdle to glaze testing is having enough of the thing to which the glaze is going to be applied.  Well, this is true for me at least.  I like to do line blends.  Years of scientific research have taught me that the one condition you think will be worthless is usually your best test subject.  Typically, a line blend for me is a 10% step down so there are 11 total tests in each series (100% à 0%).  We started out by having Rob throw lots of little miniature pots.  He hates this, I think, and truthfully it does take away from the amount of time he is able to throw real pottery.  So, we started rolling out slabs of clay and cutting them into tiles.  There was a lot of folding, breaking, bad language, etc and of course it was very slow.  The process was involved because I need tiles that are self-supporting but also thin enough to mimic Robert’s throwing thickness.

So, a while ago we got a pugmill.  It’s a fantastic invention, and I don’t really know how we lived without it.  We had the forethought to order the “tile nozzle” attachment.  This reduces the size and shape of the cylindrical pug to a flat 2 inch x 5 inch tile.  It also came with a few pieces of plywood.  These one uses to cut little shapes out of to make “dies” for the pugmill through which clay can be extruded.  So, in principal it’s just like a hand driven extruder except it has a motorized auger and vacuum pump – YES!

So, we thought about it and came up with a self supporting shape – sort of an upside down 7.  We cut this shape out of the plywood and affixed the negative die to the end of the tile nozzle extension.  After a little fiddling with clay of different consistencies, I managed to produce about 50 test tiles in less than half an hour.  Woo Hoo!!!

Now that I can pug these little puppies out, the limiting step is how fast I can mix each dilution in a line blend.  I’ll have to figure out some way to automate that next.  When I do, I’ll be rich!  The kiln is on a bisque cycle right now and has about 400 little tiles in it.  I am so excited I could barf.  Too bad I already have enough tests planned for all 400 tiles.

Alright..after some annoying rainy days of my tamil poetry..here comes the stormy rants..Upon the request of my close pal,who wanted my previous posts to be in tamil..I know it was high time to post this one..Not because am not silver-tongued in tamil,neither do i admonish ones who do..but the unalloyed truth is that my thoughts&writings are candid and doesnt always involve one particular language.Albeit,my writings had never been adept or virtuoso kind,I can vouch it might entertain the bored soul.Fine,let me come to the point.

I penned this post,not really out of interest but then just because of funny words adorning the urban dictionary,which at times,I can never avoid neither do i really approbate of.A sleazy lotuseater creates it,uses it for communication,the teens consider it cool and then there are some media which propagates it,and finally it is in the urban dictionary.Mind you,if you do not know ‘da l8est slang’ you are anachronous.

Some other words for which i felt antiquated was like ‘da saughty ones’.First thing,it is ‘The’ not ‘da’ and i had heard naughty…but whats saughty..With that question in my mind  I went through the thesaurus to look up the meaning.I couldnt find it either.Finally,google came to my help and seems it meant ’stupid’.Blah..I really felt stupid by now,as this was used in an international congregation with super-eminent people.Not to sound soporific,the lingering question in my mind is whether this kind of ’slang’ will transmutate the vocabulary which we have now or may be our ‘the’ will become ‘da’ in thesaurus.Whatever ‘Letz rock da english till it gets fail and all laffy taffy’……………………………………………………….( Or am I just too crazy to keep rodomontading about it?!!!) Thats the one which hitches the ganesh-particle of all my thoughts.Bug you soon..