EuphemismsFollow

Politicians, TV Broadcasters and the Pentagon. Man, they just love to call a spade an earth inverting horticultural implement.

There are so many phrases that try to soften the truth, or to sugar-coat the pill.

Military ones:
"Friendly Fire" = Accidentally killing your comrades
"Collateral Damage" = Killing innocent civilians
"Acute Negative Altitude" = The plane crashed

Medical:
"New Tissue Formation" = Cancer
"Negative Surgical Outcome" = The patient died on the operating table
"The Worried Well" = Timewasting hypchondriacs
"Watchful Waiting" = We haven't a clue what's wrong, but it looks fUcking serious.

Religious:
"Gone to sleep" = Dead
"At rest" = Dead
"At the Lord's right hand" = Dead


So we have posters here from a range of professional backgrounds. What euphemisms do you hear regularly?

I know lots of handy acronyms... but Euphemisms... hmmm

Technology ones:
"Known issues" = Stuff that we know is broken and aren't really sure how to fix
"Patch" = A fix for a known issue which normally breaks something else in the process
"Undocumented feature" = A bug that turns out to be useful

Medical ones:
"Bedpan nurse" = A nurse that shiny, full of crap, and best when dumped

Military ones:
"Weapons of mass destruction" = "They've got something we want"

In Business:

"special projects" = Where we stick people we'd rather not work on anything important without telling them that's what we're doing. We'll trim these projects off during the next round of layoffs.

"Director: Special Projects" = The title we give someone so dangerous that we're willing to promote them and give them a whole budget, staff, and bogus objective just to get them away from anything really important.


I'm sure there's a ton more, but I always get a kick out of these.

One of my favorite Southern expressions is, "Bless his heart." It means, "What a complete fUcktard."

If we going for acronyms:

Tech:

Error code 12 - The error exists 12 inches from the computer (IE the user)
DFU error - Dumb youknowwhat user
PLBKAC - Problem lies between Keyboard and Chair
ID10T error - Self explanatory (though told to the user as I - D - ten - T error)
Unknown error - User messed up and doesn't want to say how
Unusual activity - "I think that www.xxx.com is not about the Vin Diesel movie."
Sufficient memory - Just enough memory to not be able to run the one game you want to play.

Thank god I don't work where you do. My title? Special Projects.

"Use a bigger hammer" - Mocking suggestion used by US Navy Nukes to people too stupid to solve a problem by thinking it out.

Others at work:


"R&R" = Remove and replace

"R&R the Stick Actuator" = The pilot is being a dumbshit, get a different pilot.

You Brits treat patients like a Ford.

Edited, May 29th 2007 10:12am by Kaelesh

A common one at many hospitals is the "DFO" or "Done Fall Out" cart. It's a reference to poor uneducated Southern black women who show up at the Emergency Room with babies who have just "done fall out" precipitating the registering nurse to grab the DFO cart and attend to the resulting mess. Over time the definition seems to have included nearly any accident or problem of non-English speaking patient who drops in for some unscheduled medical attention.

/shrugs

Hey, don't shoot the messenger here, guys. I didn't invent the term.

Totem

In my industry we tend to need to refer to our clients euphemistically. If we didn't, there would be considerably fewer of us.

End User = Some f'ucking moron, being paid $6 USD an hour to answer a phone and rattle off an account balance, possessing a goldfish-like inability to remember anything for longer than 30 seconds at a time, who likes to call about system errors you just explained away as being nuclear weapons going off at the data center.

Business Tester = Some f'ucking moron who, regardless of how many times you explain to them that there are 6 different criteria used to determine call routing, continues to report bugs regarding the same single criteria when the other 5 pieces of data associated with an account require a call to be transferred regardless of how delinquent it may or may not be.

Business Analyst = Some f'ucking moron who, regardless of how many times you explain to them that no, it is not, in fact, ok to call you with every little issue that arises in a test cycle because if they did you'd sit on the phone walking the other f'ucking morons, or Business Testers, through how to push buttons on a phone all day long, continues to miss the Bob damn boat on evolving in to a sentient being.

Project Manager = Some f'ucking moron who, after the rest of the f'ucking morons run to her when I slip up and call them f'ucking morons for being a little f'ucking moronic, expects that I will react differently when a powerless little f'ucking moron threatens to talk to my boss about it if I don't comply, even though my boss thinks she's an even bigger f'ucking moron than I do.

EDIT: I don't want to make any sweeping generalizations here, because Bob knows I am nothing if not specific, but it occurs to me that the current project my team is involved in deals with all four of the above referenced catagories of f'ucking morons. Can it be coincidence then that the people in all four catagories are strictly women?

Edited, May 30th 2007 1:18pm by MoebiusLord

/nods at that.

And who was it had "DILLIGAF" in their sig? That's now in common use at my place of work.