2003-03-25 - 3:03 p.m.

I was just in a meeting with about 20 people, including Psycho. The people who called the meeting and were supposed to be running it never showed up so it just goes to show what a swell place Officeville is all around. We tried to run the meeting without the key attendees but very little happened. Psycho, however, wasn't going to miss an opportunity to make herself look stupid in front of everyone.

"We should probably deprecate the code that we have in there now," she suggested.

The room fell silent and the entire meeting stared at her for a moment, probably all thinking to themselves "do you even know what that word means?!" After a moment someone said "What?"

"Deprecate the code," she repeated, looking annoyed. "It means we should take it out of use. It's a programming term."

The rest of the room just stared at her for a moment and continued the meeting. The definition of "deprecate" that came to mind for most of the meeting attendees was probably the following from Merriam-Webster:

1 a archaic : to pray against (as an evil) b : to seek to avert
2 : to express disapproval of
3 a : PLAY DOWN : make little of b : BELITTLE, DISPARAGE

A more obscure definition of the word might be found in say, the Perl Programmers Reference guide, "deprecate" can be used in the following manner:

set/get attributes of a subroutine (deprecated)

Either way, poor word choice, but what can you expect from someone who can't even master the concept of proper nouns.

Also, although this is off topic for this entry, I feel I should add that today the fire alarm went off. I guess someone tried taking my suggestion about hiding the toaster oven. Whoever you are, good try, but next time perhaps leave a large jug of gasoline near by so you can really set things ablaze.

previous - next