Language Log

On the base station for the wireless telephone system at my apartment there is a red light. I looked up in the manual to see what the semantics was. The relevant diagram was clear and explicit. The line pointing to that light on the picture of the base station unit said: "TAM LED". Neither "TAM" nor "LED" had been previously glossed anywhere in the manual (the diagram was fairly near the beginning, on page 10). That is a classic example of the sort of thing I refer to as nerdview.

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"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.

I haven't revisited the topic of nerdview for some time now, but I thought of it again when I saw the utter, dispiriting uselessness of the sticky label I saw on Thursday morning:

THIS REFUSE HAS BEEN CHECKED FOR ILLEGAL PRESENTATION.

What the hell, I hope you are asking yourself, is that about? You need to live in Edinburgh's New Town to figure it out instantly. For the rest of you, I will explain.

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On a recycling dumpster outside an office building in Edinburgh: MIXED CARDBOARD ONLY. That, although it's subtle, is a case of the phenomenon for which I have been using the (not exactly ideal) term nerdview. It is an example of a linguistically misleading communication in which the failure is not of grammar or meaning but of failing to keep in mind the viewpoint of the reader rather than the specialist (possibly nerdy) view of the writer. Do you see why?

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Language Log readers may appreciate the following classic example of writing in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader. I was engaged in reserving a rental car on the web, and got the date syntax wrong. Instead of having one of those little click-on-the-calendar widgets, the site required entry of the date of the reservation in a blank box using a strict syntax that it did not explain until the reservation failed and an error message was displayed. By strict syntax I mean (i) slash must be used as separator (continuous numbers will not work), (ii) day must be before month (American month-day-year syntax will not work), and (iii) the date must be four digits (two-digit year indications won't work). I'm not worried about having to know the date syntax of the culture I'm in; I can deal with that. And although the 4-digit year is a bit crazy (since time travel is impossible, the first two digits will be 2 and 0 for all reservations for the next 92 years, so they are not carrying much information), that piece of programming stupidness is not my concern here. The classic bit was the error message that popped up in red:

Please select a valid pick up date (DD/MM/YYYY) greater than today.

Have you ever said "I could do lunch any day next week greater than Tuesday"? Or "It would be helpful if you could deliver it greater than the 27th"? Or "I'm younger than my wife because my birthday is eight days greater than hers"? Of course you haven't.

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