Today marks the end of Just Jot It January for 2022, and I’d like to thank Linda for offering it again for our January anusement. The last word for this year is facetious, sent in by Susan from Don’t Curse The Nurse! Thank you Susan for that excellent suggestion.

First, this interesting factoid:

I didn’t know that. I probably could have figured it out in, say, 200 years or so…

That’s an example of a facetious remark: "I probably could have figured it out in, say, 200 years or so…" The more direct remark would have been, "I could have never have figured that out," but saying it the way I did introduces an element of humor into the proceedings. A very small element, but an element nonetheless.

I had a friend who, on hearing a very minor piece of bad news (say, "We’re out of Froot Loops"), would say "That’s it! We’re doomed! We’re all going to die!" It’s not quite sarcastic, but you know that the world isn’t going to come to a cataclysmic end because you’re out of a specific cereal. Well, unless the only other kind of cereal you have is Shredded Wheat, which is like eating a Brillo pad.

One of my favorite examples of facetiousness (bordering on the sarcastic) is the episode of Cheers in which Diane Chambers, having been told earlier by a British marriage expert (played by John Cleese) that she and Sam Malone are totally wrong for each other and should get as far away from each other as is humanly possible, hectors the man until… well, here…

This being the end of the Just Jot It January blog hop, here’s a commercial for Brillo scouring pads.

Linda got today’s word from Jenny over at Coffee In The Rain, which I’m certain everyone here follows. Right? RIGHT? If you don’t, you ought to. Anyway, the word for today is "prepare."

This is a computer-related post, but no technical stuff, I promise. I’ll either explain the terminology or point you to where you can get an explanation, but it’s not necessary to understand anything more than I’ll tell you.

The company I worked for from 1984 to 2004 created a fourth-generation language (4GL), which was a lot easier to work with than third-generation languages such as COBOL. One of the reasons that 4GL’s are so easy to work with is that you don’t have to know anything about where your data are kept or how to access it. You simply tell the computer to get it for you, and it does. The commands were easy to work with and required little understanding of programming to produce a report for yourself. It was a distinct selling point of our software that we had this miraculous tool to allow end users to write and run their own reports, thus freeing up the IT staff for things like playing solitaire.

In truth, the language was not exactly a 4GL. In order for it to be a real 4GL. we wouldn’t need a step that translates what the user writes into machine language before execution, and we needed one. This is a process called compiling, and if you have to compile your program before running it, your language isn’t a 4GL.

Our solution for this problem was to simply call the compile step something other than compiling. We called it "preparing." Then, when they asked us during the sales cycle "Do you have a 4GL?" we could tell them "yes." We knew, and the customers also figured out, that what we were calling "preparing" was actually "compiling," By that time, they were so used to using it that they didn’t really care.

Today’s word is given to us by Lakshmi Bhat, who chose the word abscission, and Linda actually let her. Anyway, be sure and drop by both their blogs and say "howdy!"

Naturally, I had to look up abscission in the dictionary, which told me that it comes from the Latin scindere, meaning "to cut." The ab- prefix means "from," so it means "to cut from." Plants have an abscission zone, in which the enzymes are produced and stored that tell the plant to shed its leaves. The dictionary makes sure that we all understand the difference between abscission and incision, which is cutting into a thing, specifically a body. Sounds rather macabre, doesn’t it?

Mary, my wife of 44 years as of today, knits and crochets, and thus has a number of pairs of scissors sitting around to cut yarn as well as older pairs to cut things like boxes. I had exactly one pair, a small pair designed specifically to trim mustaches and beards, which I would use once or twice a month to trim my mustache, whenever I started eating it with my food. They came in a set with a wee comb with which I could comb it. One day, I went to trim my mustache because she complained, and the scissors were gone. I asked her "where are my mustache scissors?" and she said "I dunno; where did you last see them?" I said, "in the bathroom, in the case where I always put them."

Anyway, one day she’s going through a knitting project that she hadn’t worked on in some time, and lo and behold, there were my mustache scissors. She had "borrowed" them, no doubt intending to return them, and they ended up in the bag with her project…

Thanks to Linda for coördinating Just Jot It January and to Kim for providing us with today’s word, understanding.

Understandings are implicit agreements between people. For example, not calling after 10 PM unless it’s an emergency, no loud music after midnight, put the seat down after you use the toilet, and if you use the last of the toilet paper, replace the roll. Other names for an agreement of this sort might be "etiquette" or "common courtesy," both of which seem to have fallen by the wayside in these times.