Dr. Dobb's Journal December 1997
With a loud report, a flack barrage comes in from the north. Sifting through the rubble that is my desktop, I read that Bill Gates and family have moved into their new home in time for Christmas. How sweet. The report says that it was hard for the assessor to establish a value for the Gates estate, because "there is nothing else quite like it." I humbly suggest that the assessor use as a comparable Stately Swaine Manor, the palatial estate in which "Swaine's Flames" is handcrafted.
I complained in October that Microsoft always refers to its mouse buttons as "right mouse button" and "left mouse button," and that, if you reassign their functions, as many left-handed people do and as Microsoft encourages, these names are perpetually wrong. Functional names would get around the problem, but in ten years, Microsoft has never come up with functional names for those buttons.
Several right-handed readers suggested that we lefties should knock off the whining and get a life. Come the revolution, they're getting it first.
One reader claimed that "right mouse button" actually is a functional name. I thought long and hard about that. The only way I can see that "right mouse button" can name a function is if there's a problem with the buttons rolling over on their backs, and you have to press the mouse button to "right" it. Just a second while I right my mouse button. Geez, that's rather annoying, isn't it? See, this is why I continue to use a Mac. With a Mac, you don't have mouse buttons rolling over on their backs.
Or hardly ever. Not until Rhapsody is released, anyway.
Hal Hardenbergh wrote to correct my misspelling, somewhere, of flacks, as in "PR flacks." I had apparently written "flaks," which, as Hal correctly points out, isn't the right word, or even the right plural of the wrong word.
Flacks are public relations specialists, called that after one Gene Flack, a movie publicist in the 1930s. Flak, a word coined at about the same time, refers to shrapnel from enemy fire. (There is apparently no friendly flak.) It's a near-acronym, short for "Flieger Abwehr Kanone." After the second or third time you had to say, "Look out for that Flieger Abwehr Kanone," I imagine you'd be ready for something shorter. The plural of flak is more flak. Flak can also be spelled flack, but that doesn't get me off the hook, because flack is never spelled flak. I may have been thinking of flak catchers, a term Tom Wolfe popularized back in the '70s. A flak catcher is a human sacrifice to the slavering mob, a bureaucrat who listens to grievances so the Big Man doesn't have to. Flak catchers are flacks assigned to damage control. So flacks do have a connection with flak. They can take it but they can't dish it out. But they do roll over on their backs when you push the right button.
Tony Nowikowski reminds me that John Messagebox didn't write the song I implicitly credited him with in September, he just borrowed it from Van Moreicons.
My gloss on the term "nos" in October (nostrum is quack medicine, "nos" is a prefix meaning illness, and so on) brought some further dissublimations of the subliminal message of the Network Operating System. Mike Morton asks, "Will we see a campaign to 'Just say NOS'?" No doubt, and let us not stick our necks out by forgetting the big nos himself, nos feratu.
Mike also questions my use of the word "enfringe" in that same column, suspecting that I may have meant "infringe," which, unlike "enfringe," actually appears in the dictionary. He speculates about what "enfringe" might mean. To decorate with tassels, perhaps? or to move to the extremes of a political spectrum?
It means both, actually. To enfringe is to decorate with right and left buttons from the extremes of the political spectrum. As in, "He enfringed his poncho with JUST SAY NOs and QUESTION AUTHORITYs."
--Michael Swaine