language

Big-number cheat sheet and BetterTouchTool

BetterTouchTool is one of my favorite Mac utilities. A real sleeper: originally it just let you create new trackpad gestures (or remap existing ones), and that was useful enough on its own, but it’s been beefed up with more and more interesting features. One feature I just discovered is that it can display a floating window with any HTML you want. This is a perfect way to show my Big Number Cheat Sheet, which is handy for checking your work when dealing with, well, big Japanese numbers.

To use this, open up BTT, add a new triggering event (can be triggered by a key command or text string, trackpad, whatever), and add the action Utility Actions > Show Floating Web View/HTML menu. Give it a name, set it to a width of 500, height of 750, and paste the following in directly. (Posting this online introduces a space between the opening < and !DOCTYPE — that should be deleted.) Be sure to enable “show window buttons” and/or “close when clicking outside” or the window won’t go away.

< !DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title> </title>
    <style> 
        body {
        background-color: #fff;
        font-family: helvetica;
        font-size: 14/18;
        }
        table {
        border-collapse: collapse;
        }
        tr, td, th {
        border: none;
        }
        tr {
        border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
        }
        table tr td:nth-child(1), table tr th:nth-child(1) {
        width: 7em;
        padding: 0.5em;
        text-align: right;
        }
        table tr td:nth-child(2), table tr th:nth-child(2) {
        width: 12em;
        padding: 0.5em;
        text-align: left;
        }
        table tr td:nth-child(3), table tr th:nth-child(3) {
        padding: 0.5em;
        text-align: left;
        }
        tr:hover {
        color: #ddd;
        background-color: #333;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>
    Big number cheatsheet 
</h1>
<table>
    <tr>
        <th> 和 </th>
        <th> English </th>
        <th> Number </th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 一万 </td>
        <td> ten thousand </td>
        <td> 10,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 十万 </td>
        <td> one hundred thousand </td>
        <td> 100,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 百万 </td>
        <td> one million </td>
        <td> 1,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 千万 </td>
        <td> ten million </td>
        <td> 10,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 一億 </td>
        <td> one hundred million </td>
        <td> 100,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 十億 </td>
        <td> one billion </td>
        <td> 1,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 百億 </td>
        <td> ten billion </td>
        <td> 10,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 千億 </td>
        <td> one hundred billion </td>
        <td> 100,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 一兆 </td>
        <td> one trillion </td>
        <td> 1,000,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 十兆 </td>
        <td> ten trillion </td>
        <td> 10,000,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 百兆 </td>
        <td> one hundred trillion </td>
        <td> 100,000,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 千兆 </td>
        <td> one quadrillion </td>
        <td> 1,000,000,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td> 一京 </td>
        <td> ten quadrillion </td>
        <td> 10,000,000,000,000,000 </td>
    </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Colors

Translating a document that involves optics, I ran into what I immediately recognized as ROYGBIV in Japanese:

紫、青、水色、緑、黄、オレンジ、赤

(actually that’s VIBGYOR, but the point is the same)

I had never really stopped to consider how ROYGBIV might be expressed in Japanese, but it’s an interesting question, because the Japanese word that is ordinarily rendered in English as “blue”, 青 ao, can mean blue or green. “Vegetables” in Japanese can be 青物; a green light is an 青信号. And here it’s being pushed further down the spectrum, away from green, to stand for “indigo.”

The color that holds blue’s place in the above list is 水色, “water-colored.”

And that makes me wonder, what is the color “indigo” anyhow? How is it different from blue? Why do we have two color words for what’s basically the same thing? Apparently I’m in good company—according to Wikipedia, Asimov said “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.” Wikipedia has quite a bit more to say about the color indigo: “According to Gary Waldman, ‘A careful reading of Newton’s work indicates that the color he called indigo, we would normally call blue; his blue is then what we would name blue-green or cyan.'”

Curiouser and curiouser. It seems as if 青 would be a good fit for Newton’s usage of blue, and ç´º would correspond better to indigo, but it’s also interesting to observe how the meaning of simple color words has apparently shifted in English. And 水色 is a pretty good fit for what Newton meant by “blue.”

The Wikipedia article is also interesting in that it explains why there are seven colors in ROYGBIV in the first place, when our modern color models are based on three primary colors (RGB or CMY) with secondaries and tertiaries in between: it was an arbitrary decision to force the colors to correspond with the seven notes of the Western musical scale.

Buzzword-compliant

Translating a press release about a new server with a new Intel chip, which describes all the buzzwords the chip is compliant with. Because the release is in Japanese, I’m not sure how these buzzwords are supposed to be rendered in English. Google to the rescue. They are:

  • Turbo Boost
  • QuickPath
  • Hyper-Threading

Got that? One is written as two words, one is InterCapped, and one is hyphenated. Get it together, guys.

Tunnelling towards the truth

tunnelling spelling trouble

Check out the two screenshots crops above. Observe that in each, one instance of the word has been flagged as misspelled, and the other has not.

I ran into this problem while working on a translation job. The client had instructed me to overtype an existing Japanese document in order to preserve the formatting. After nosing around for a minute, I discovered that the upper line was marked as US English, and the lower line was marked as UK English (I prefer the UK spelling in this case). Not sure how those language settings got into a Japanese document.

We need a word

Paging Rich Hall: In this modern era, when people communicate by blog, IM, twitter, e-mail, phone, and occasionally in person, we sometimes respond to things that our interlocutor said in a different medium—sometimes when it’s not obvious we were even a party to the referenced statement, which can be momentarily disorienting for the person who made that statement.

We need a word for this practice of abruptly picking up a conversation in a different medium. Electrolocute? Ricosay? Resumversation?

Translation and situation

I’m translating segments of a Japanese TV show right now. It’s very different from my usual work, and not what I consider a strong suit, but the client seems happy with my work right now, so I’ll take it.

This particular show is of the “physical challenge reality TV” variety. It’s sort of like the show Ninja Warrior that’s currently on U.S. cable, but much sillier and with recognizable Japanese TV celebrities as commentators and sometimes as competitors. The commentators are clearly trying to call the proceedings the way a sports announcer would, and as I go along, I’m trying to imagine how it would sound if Bob Costas were calling the games with my translation. But some of this stuff doesn’t translate. It’s not so much that I don’t know the words, or don’t know what the speakers mean by them (although that happens here and there), it’s just that they’re saying things that would never be said in the same situation in an English-speaking contest.

I just ran flat-faced into a perfect example. The game in question has the contestants trying to sit atop a gigantic ball and navigate it through an obstacle course. At one point, one of the contestants gets stuck in a hole and is rocking unsteadily and impotently, trying to get out. The commentator says “まるで現代人の日常の不安定感をビジュアル化したかのようだ,” which I have translated somewhat loosely as “It’s as if the malaise of modern life has been made tangible in his plight.”

And there’s the thing. No American sports announcer, no matter how literate, would ever say anything remotely like that in this situation. I’m content with the translation, but it’s undeniably weird to an American audience. Then again, the rest of the show is kind of weird.

Google Crowdsourcing Machine Translation

Screenshot of google translation crowdsourcing interface

I clicked through a link from a gadget site to a machine-translated press release for a new car-stereo head unit. I noticed that when my cursor hovered over a block of text, one of those floating mock-windows that are so popular in web2.0 appeared. It permits readers to enter their own translation for that sentence or chunk of text.

This is interesting, and something I hadn’t noticed before. It raises all kinds of interesting questions. Most obviously, how do they vet these reader-submitted translations? But it’s fascinating as a machine-translation paradigm. There are two general approaches to MT: one is basically lexical and grammatical analysis and substitution: diagramming sentences, dictionary lookup, etc. The other is “corpus based”, that is, having a huge body of phrase pairs, where one can be substituted for the other. And there is a hybrid between the two, that uses the corpus-based approach, but with some added smarts that permits a given phrase to serve as a pattern for novel phrases not found in the corpus (this is also pretty much how computer-assisted translation, or CAT, works). I wonder how these crowdsourced submissions work back into the MT backend—if they’re used strictly in a corpus-based translation layer, or if they get extrapolated into patterns. I’m skeptical that they’re getting a significant number of submissions through this system, but if they did, the range of writing styles, language ability, and so on that would be feeding into the system would seem to make it incredibly complicated. And perhaps a huge jump forward in improvement over older MT systems…but perhaps a huge clusterfuck of unharmonized spammy nonsense.

Writing well and translating poorly

Paul Graham always writes interesting articles (though I can’t figure out for the life of me why he hosts them as a Yahoo store), but I don’t track him very closely, so when I ran across a link to his somewhat old Writing, Briefly, I read it eagerly.

And noticed with interest that it has been translated into a number of languages, including a Japanese version (which I can read), and a Spanish version (which I can kinda fake). His advice “use simple, germanic words” may be good (though I’d phrase it as “Anglo-Saxon words”), and as a translation issue, it certainly stands out.

The Spanish translator preserved it but struck it out: “usa palabras simples, germánicas;”

The Japanese translator included it without comment: “簡単でドイツ語的な単語を使いなさい。”

Now, the funny thing here is that there’s a pretty good equivalent to Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for Japanese—大和言葉. I’m not how perfectly the two accord, or whether avoiding 漢語 would be as important to a Japanese version of Paul Graham as avoiding Latinate words apparently is to the English-speaking Paul Graham. Regardless, though, the translator kept that in there. Apparently the translator is relying on the reader to keep in mind that this is a translation of an English text for English audiences, and to understand what Germanic vocabulary means in terms of English style. Going the other way, I would never make that assumption—an English audience would be completely lost if I presented them with the phrase “yamato kotoba” in a text translated from Japanese. But then again, it might be jarring to them if I adapted the concept to “Anglo-Saxon vocabulary” if they knew that my piece was a translation. One could dodge this by simply saying “use native vocabulary.”

The case with Spanish is knotty in its own way. I know Spanish has its share of loanwords, but it doesn’t have the overwhelming influence of French and Latin that English has (and even if it did, it would be harder to tell them apart), or of Chinese that Japanese has. So the call to use native vocabulary is redundant. The way the translator chose to deal with it here is interesting—it transparently acknowledges that the text is a translation, and that in this case, the idea doesn’t quite fit in the translation.

Jabberwocky in Japanese

Language Hat posted links to some translations of Jabberwocky, which has been a pet interest of mine ever since I saw the French and German translations in GEB. Someone, years ago, sent me a bunch of Japanese translations of Jabberwocky, and they’ve been languishing on my hard drive ever since. Now seems like a good time to get them out there.

I am posting these with minimal formatting because I’m lazy. Headings are translator names. Notes and credits are as I received them. See after the jump.

Denotation vs connotation

Out near Johnson City, there’s a new development going in called “Tierra Mañana.”

Consider the impression this phrase creates, and how very different it is from that of “Tomorrowland.”

Alfresco Whispers

Post-move, I’ve been cleaning out some old papers, and found this. I’ve decided to type it up and post it online for the benefit of future generations. This was originally typed up (and orchestrated) by Chris Poole. Although I’ve tried very hard to reproduce this in exactly the same form as Chris typed it up, it’s quite possible that I’ve introduced a few typos.

I don’t remember exactly which one of these I translated, but it was somewhere in the late 30s/early 40s.

At the closing luncheon of IJET-4 an exercise in consecutive translating was conducted, drawing on the expertise of the assembled translators and interpreters. A simple phrase in English was chosen as the starting point and a Japanese speaker was asked to translate it. This in turn was translated back into English, and then back into Japanese again and so on. People were asked to translate into their own language and were given sixty seconds to do so. No one saw anything but the previous version, and were therefore unaware of the subtle changes that were taking place.
It should be noted here that some difficulty was encountered due to people’s handwriting, but as the participants became aware of the overall objective, a guarantee of anonymity seemed to become more important. In deference to these numerous requests I therefore present the results typed up, with annotation where appropriate.

  1. Bridges between cultures are built on foundations of tolerance.
  2. 文化のかけ橋、忍耐を土台となる。
  3. Patience, indeed, is the foundation of bridges between cultures.
  4. 文化のかけ橋になるのは、忍耐しかありません。 “Foundation” component of metaphor disappears.
  5. The only cultural bridge is forbearance 忍耐 alternatively translated as “tolerance,” “patience” and “forbearance”. The latter perhaps confusing the translator, who finds refuge in an ambiguous use of the word 理解 which then of course becomes “understanding”. A very durable concept which lasts until 21.
  6. 文化は他を理解することで結ばれる。 “Bridge” metaphor disappears via 結び and “link”.
  7. Cultures are linked by understanding others.
  8. 他の人たちを理解することにより文化交流がなされる。 “People” are introduced through the ambiguity of 他.
  9. Cultural exchange is done by evaluating other people.
  10. 文化交流は、外国の人を理解することから始まる。
  11. International understanding begins with an understanding of foreign people.
  12. 国際理解は外国の人を理解するから始まる。
  13. International understanding begins with an understanding of foreign people.
  14. 国際理解は外国人を理解するから始まる。
  15. International understanding begins with the act of understading foreigners.
  16. 会得する、理解、始めに、その行動は外国人の行動を理解すること。
  17. Understand first that behavior is to understand the behavior of foreigners. Statement becomes rather incoherent imperative due to confusing layout of 16.
  18. 外国人の行動であるとまず理解すること。 Does not read 17 as imperative.
  19. To understand from the outset that this is the way foreigners behave. Seems to become conditional clause here.
  20. 外国の方はこういうふうに行動するものだと初めから理解すること。
  21. You must understand that this is how foreigners behave. Back to the imperative.
  22. 外国の方はこうなさいます。 Then back again to descriptive statement.
  23. This is the way foreigners would do it. “would do it” if what? Do what?
  24. これは外国人がよくするやり方です。 Solves above problem, but introduces question of frequency.
  25. This is what foreigners often do.
  26. 外国がどんあことをよく行いますか? Inexplicably becomes question. Also omits 人, leaving sentence to mean “what sort of things do foreign countries often do?”
  27. What kind of things do they like to do in foreign countries? In order to make sense of the above, invents identity/ies, not necessarily native to the countries, who now have a choice about “what they do”.
  28. その人たちは(かれらは)外国にいったときどんなことをしたいのでしょうか。 Good, if cumbersome, translation that makes it plain that “they” are visitors.
  29. What do you think they might want to do when they go overseas?
  30. 太りすぎたらどう対処すると思いますか。 Handwriting problem. Misreads “overseas” as “overeats”.
  31. If you are too fat, how do you handle the problem? Introduces value judgment on obesity.
  32. 太りすぎていたら、どうそれに対応しますか。 Female translator said she would rather not translate something like this. I emphasised that it was only a game so she obliged (but didn’t see obesity as a problem).
  33. If you were too fat, what would you do?
  34. ふとり過ぎていたら貴方はどうなさいますか。 Renders “you” as 貴方
  35. What will the lord do when he gets too fat? Mistakes 貴方 for 貴族 and renders it as “lord”.
  36. 神は肥りすぎたらどうするか? Reads “lord” as “God”.
  37. What do you do if God is too fat? 37, 39, 43, 47 all manage without a personal pronoun in Japanese. Personal pronounds cause problems on both occasions they appear in 34 and 40.
  38. 神様があまり太っていたらどうしますか。
  39. What would you do if god was too fat?
  40. 神が肥満過多だったら貴方は… Bases vague, open-ended questiion on condition that God were too fat.
  41. If God were too fat, what would you be? Good logical translation that deduces remainder of question.
  42. 肥りすぎの神様がいったらどう思いますか? Raises question of attitude rather than “being”.
  43. If there is an overweight God, what do you think?
  44. 太りすぎの神様がいるとすればどう思いますか。
  45. What would you think of a fat God.
  46. 太った神様をどう思もいますか。 Rumoured fat God lives!
  47. What do you think of the fat God.
  48. 神様太ったでしょう? Renders simple question as traditional Japanese greeting addressed to God.
  49. You look well God! Good translation.
  50. やあ、元気そうじゃないか! Supreme being departs as “God” is read simply as exclamatory component of greeting.
  51. Hello my lover. You’m be lookin’ fine today (Devonshire) Very ably translated into equivalent dialect.

Mnumerimonic

I knew a woman once with the nickname “Sproidy”–she was given this monicker because the letters on the dial of the phone could be used to spell that. I occasionally find myself using this trick in reverse when I need to invent a numeric passcode or the like–I pick a convenient word, and work out the numbers on a phone dial that correspond to it.

There ought to be a name for words and numbers created using this trick, of using numbers to generate words, or vice-versa. Since these are generally used as an aide-memoire, I kind of like “mnumerimonic.” Another possibility might be “numerinym,” though that would only make sense for to words generated from numbers.

Translate this!

Fellow translators of Japanese know that personal names are all but impossible to translate with certainty unless you can ask the person who owns the name how they prefer to have it romanized. When I’m translating a scientific paper (as I am now), the problem is acute, since there is usually a bibliography packed with Japanese names, but these names can often be tracked down, as the authors occasionally have their own web pages, or have been published before in English. So I spend a lot of time googling for their papers and their names.

One citation in my current job has eight names to track down. Ouch. I googled all the surnames together in the hopes that I’d find some bilingual reference with their names. I did not, but I did find a long listing of papers that included the one I’m looking at. Google helpfully offered to translate the page for me. The results for the names in question are interesting and amusing:

汐 promontory positive, increase mountain reason, Kazuhiro Yamamoto, Hiroshi Kondo 也, Doi 玲 child, Ono Megumi child and Ken under village, Ogasawara Masafumi

The Chinese Room

The Chinese Room, sometimes referred to as the Chinese Box, is a thought-experiment invented by John Searle to debunk “strong AI.”

Searle’s argument is that you put an English speaker in a little room. Slips of paper with Chinese are passed in; the English speaker refers to a huge compendium of rules for analyzing and responding to these slips; he follows these rules, produces new slips in response, and passes them out of the room. To a Chinese speaker on the outside, these would appear to be perfectly reasonable responses to the statements on the slips inside, but (according to Searle) that doesn’t mean that the guy in the room understands Chinese.

Jenny and I have long used the Chinese Room as a metaphor for the translation process in some of our knottier jobs–not so much in terms of our weakness with language but with the field of knowledge. I was recently asked to do a mercifully short job on seismology (about which I know almost nothing) that put me in mind of this. The job contained terms that I don’t know in Japanese, and when I found their English equivalents (or in some cases, what I was guessing to be their English equivalents), I dutifully typed them into my translation with only the most superficial idea what they might really mean. Chinese Room. When we find ourselves in situations like this, we just clench our sphincters and hope that the eventual target audience will know what the hell we’re talking about, because we sure don’t.

But thinking about the original Chinese Room argument (and surrounding debate, which is extensive) is frustrating because it is so perfectly hypothetical. Searle’s point was to create an analog to the Turing Test (digression: I just learned that, quite fortuitously, today would have been Alan Turing’s 92nd birthday) that would show up the absurdity of AI. The problem with his argument is that it’s so procedural, so mechanistic. The idea is that there can be a rote response for every input. (This is pretty much the same problem that machine translation today has.) The Chinese room would probably need to be infinitely large to accommodate all the rule books, and it would certainly take an infinite amount of time to prepare those books.

One of the primary arguments against Searle was that the guy in the room might not know Chinese, but the system (of which he is a part) does know it. OK, Searle responds, suppose the guy memorizes all the rulebooks so he doesn’t need to be in the room anymore: he still wouldn’t know Chinese. Aside from it being an improbable memory feat, I’d argue that yes, actually, he probably would. How can you memorize all those characters and rules for dealing with them without developing some kind of internal model of how the language works? One that would allow you to consolidate all the redundancy that would need to be present in the rule books, etc. Sounds a lot like language acquisition to me. In order for Searle’s argument to work, the human would need to be as dumb as the computer, in which case, he’d be undercutting his own argument anyhow. (Digression: I’ve always been struck by how much native fluency in language is basically a matter of following a script: I noticed in Japan that whole conversations would sometimes follow a script with only one or two decision points along the way–other than that, they were entirely ritualized. But in English as well, there are so many ritualistic utterances used in specific situations, or in response to the last ritualistic utterance, that one could probably pull off a pretty good simulation of English fluency by following a rule book with instructions like “when it’s very hot out, greet people by saying “Hot enough for ya?”. Etc.)

I realize this is a tangent to Searle’s original point, but perhaps it can pertain to AI in some way after all: perhaps what the machines really need to be smart is the capacity for abstraction, induction, and deduction. I know this is what some AI researchers are working on.

Out of pocket

Just over the past few days, I’ve noticed two friends (who don’t know each other) using the phrase “out of pocket” to mean something like “very busy.” This new sense for an old phrase doesn’t seem to pop up as a popular result in Google. I asked one of them where he picked it up and if it had any particular nuance; his reply was “can’t remember,” and “no.”

Anyone out there have any insight on this?

[Later] Apparently Gwen uses this a lot, and I’ve either never been around to hear it or never paid attention (I’m going with the former); she tells me it has the added meaning of “unreachable.”

NYT on Katakana

Pretty good article in the Times today on how katakana is used. It mentions that foreigners of Japanese descent, like Alberto Fujimori and Kazuo Ishiguro get the katakana treatment on their names; what it doesn’t mention is that Fujimori, who pronounces his name Spanish-style, gets his name transliterated into kana as フヒモリ (fuhimori).

But the article overstates the standoffishness of katakana for foreign names. Katakana is used for loanwords in general, and for emphasis, and in that respect, it is very similar in function to italics in English. The fact that foreign names get swept up in katakana styling is not that big a deal.

The story reminds me of an anecdote that a friend told by back in Japan. This friend is of Japanese background, has a Japanese last name, and had been living in Japan for some time. She applied for, and got, a JCB credit card, apparently one of the first foreigners to do so. Now, credit cards in Japan always give the holder’s name in katakana; there would be no way of indicating on the card “we’re putting her name in katakana because it really belongs that way, not because of technical limitations.” So they left her last name off entirely, rather than risk having her be confused for a real Japanese.

Words and Rules

Recently finished reading Words and Rules by Steven Pinker. Very interesting and enjoyable. The book breaks down numerous aspects of the way our brains handle language by looking through the prism of irregular verbs, discussing the etymology of irregular verbs (which I found to be the most entertaining part of the book–I guess that says more about me than the book); showing regularity in irregulars (stink/stank/stunk; drink/drank/drunk) and how irregulars get regularized over time; covering how irregulars work in other languages, especially The Awful German Language, where irregular verbs outnumber regular verbs (calling into question the very notion of regularity); and even delving into the neuroanatomical basis for the problems that some people have conjugating verbs.

At the core of the book, though, he’s looking at two basic models for how we organize language in our heads: a Chomskyite rules-based model that reduces irregulars to a few basic rules, which is remarkable as an academic abstraction, but assumes that children are already doctorate-level linguists at an intuitive level; and a neural-network model that assumes our brains unthinkingly string together sounds without the meaning of the words influencing how we use them, a model that is defeated by Pinker’s favorite pet example, the verb “fly,” which is normally irregular (fly/flew) but gets regularized in the limited context of baseball–“he flied out to left field.”

Wa-oops

A pet peeve of mine is Chinese character tattoos. These are often translations of some sentiment the victim wishes to express in code, but have been translated in a way that probably won’t make sense to a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese. In other cases, they are unidiomatic or just plain wrong.

Take a gander at the two kanji above. The one on the left, å’Œ, is the character for “peace,” popular as a tattoo, on T-shirts, decorative rocks, etc. The one on the right looks exactly the same, but for one crucial stroke. In fact, it is not an actual character at all (near as I can tell), though my first guess was that it means “apricot” (I was close: 杏). It is the one on the right that I saw tattooed on the small of a woman’s back on Sunday.

What’s the correct etiquette in this situation? Should I tell her “Hey, I know you wanted the character for ‘peace’ tattooed on your back, but you wound up with something that sorta looks like ‘apricot'”? Or should I leave her in blissful ignorance, as an inside joke for those of us who know the code?

Later: Apparently other people are writing about this problem too.