Recently I learned that the word 'surgery' once meant not the process, or the branch of medicine, but the room in which it was performed, like 'nursery'. Some other words with the same set of dual meanings: grocery, perfumery, shrubbery.

In the province of the book "Metaphors We Live By", I was thinking the other night about how we open up, usually close down but sometimes close up, and we can be in lockup or lockdown.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker Adam Gopnik used the word "monition" to mean a warning. I had never seen it before, being more familiar with "admonition", which has just about identical meaning. There are other such pairs: 'mixture' and 'admixture', 'vantage' and 'advantage' (though a different meaning is more common now, or at least familiar to me, vantage can mean the same thing as advantage). What does the 'ad' prefix mean? To, toward, or on top of. 'Address' comes from 'ad-' + 'directus', so it is the thing that directs you to. In many English words the 'ad' becomes simply 'a' (plus a doubled consonant) in the presence of certain following consonants. For example: affix, apply, acclaim. It is still not obvious to me why some of the pairs I mentioned came into being when the 'ad-' version doesn't seem to have added any meaning.

I'm tremendously late on this, but Tokyo Damage Report, the hardest working blog in japan-blog-business, is back. The author still wages war against sane organization of his blog through a content management system. So instead of an index page, it appears you have to go to the archive page, with its mind-blowing layout, and try to figure out where to go from there. Enjoy.

Every time I order something from Amazon.com lately, I groan at the estimate of 5-9 business days for Free Super Saver Shipping and 3-5 days for Standard Shipping (which costs about $4.00 for a single book). Compounding this, on most of my recent orders, the order hasn't even shipped until a few days after I placed it, even though none of the items were backordered or anything.

The other two sites I order from most frequently are probably Newegg.com and Staples. My most recent Newegg order was placed on Wednesday evening and I got it this (Friday) morning. One business day, but one does pay for shipping per item at Newegg. Staples has similar performance, although they are using their own trucks to deliver the items, and not any other shipping service. A rather inadequate sample set, I admit, but when I use UPS or Fedex for any non-e-commerce shipment, there's never anything like 5-9 Business days for an estimate. Why would they bother to set up a special incredibly slow shipping program for Amazon? I realize the quick shipping from Newegg is because they have a warehouse in New Jersey, but why can't Amazon do that?

I can't help but notice that this has come while Amazon is heavily promoting it's Amazon Prime service, by which you can get free two-day shipping on "many" items for a year for an $80 flat fee. Could they have intentionally slowed down their normal shipping (or merely their estimates) to drive customers into the arms of Amazon Prime?

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While I'm getting in my digs, can I complain about the ridiculous amount of features on a typical product page at Amazon? Some of them are useful, or would be if they were used, ironically enough (Amapedia, anyone?). Others are just crap. But with "Better Together," "Accessories," "Customers who bought this item also bought," "Help others find this item," "Customers viewing this page may be interested in these Sponsored Links", "Tag this product," Tags customers associate with this product", "Customers who viewed this item also viewed", and "Rate this item to improve your recommendations," I have to hit "Page Down" 5 times, or do a lot of scrolling, to get to the customer reviews, which for me are the greatest value of Amazon, for this food processor. The elements on the page for this book are a bit different, but it still takes 5 page-downs to get to the reviews. Looking at it another way, it's nothing short of amazing that these pages, relying on so many services to produce their data, can load so quickly. But man, how about a little simplicity?

A few years ago, while on a trip to California, my coworkers and I visited the offices of one of the few other companies in the medical robotics field. The company makes a telepresence robot--a doctor operates it with a joystick and a webcam, and the robot moves while showing an image of the doctor's face on its screen, with a camera on its head that shows the doctor what the robot is seeing. The executives of the company were incredibly generous and friendly with us. They came out in the evening to show us their shop and give us great business advice.

At one point I realized that I had no idea what their product was called, and asked them. They said that internally they call it the RP6, for Remote Presence version 6, but that they try not to emphasize that with customers, because they want customers to name their own robots. They also talked about an alternate scheme that they had either thought about or used in the past, in which the product's name became either a first name or a last name, with the customer supplying the other piece. This had advantages for things like repairs or communicating over a network with multiple robots--it's easier for humans to deal with than a serial number.

I thought this approach was clever and bold. I also thought about the potential dangers of it. It's a given that sometimes, people outside the company will have to talk about the product, and not a particular physical instance of the product. What will they call it? Well, in one case, the robot was featured on a news show. They featured a particular robot in use at a hospital in New Jersey, and used the nickname the staff had given it, "Mr. Rounder", referring to the doctor's use of it to do their rounds without leaving the office. How many people now think that's the name of the product? Probably not that many, because it was not a national newscast. But my coworkers and I have since referred to it that way in conversation, simply because it was suddenly the easiest thing to do.

Another dimension of this is that the robot is channeling the presence of a person. It's a pass-through device. So how much personality should the robot itself really have? Obviously it still has some, more than a mere immobile LCD screen used for video-conferencing would have. Yet you wouldn't say you talked to Mr. Rounder today, you would say, perhaps, that you talked to the doctor on Mr. Rounder.

I finally got around to writing this because of this article in the Washington Post, about the emotional relationships soldiers develop with the robots being used on the battlefield. It's interesting to note that this happens even with machines that are really just remote-controlled devices, some of them not dissimilar to the RP6, except that they get blown up routinely (the article glosses over that fact to some degree in trying to make everything sound super high-tech). As frequently occurs in stressful circumstances, superstition is a part of it: "We always wanted him as our main robot. Every time he was working, nothing bad ever happened." It reminds me that allowing users to ascribe a personality to a machine with their imagination, whether it's a toy, a tool or a weapon, is almost always a more powerful technique than trying to build your own idea of the personality into its design.

JV asked me to comment on a Washington Post article from December 2006 about educators and students struggling with abbreviated IM and text messaging jargon slipping into schoolwork.

Stanton shared one of his favorite pieces of correspondence: "hi prof how are u culd u tell me my xm grade - tim."

"It bothers me at one level, but I try not to let it get under my
skin," he said. "But I am concerned [students] won't be successful if
they don't know how to communicate on a formal basis. The first time
they send a goofy message to the boss, they're going to be out."

JV asks "is this a problem, or should it be accepted as an evolution of the language?" I think it could be neither. I can't blame teachers for thinking it's their job to mark this, like any nonstandard usage in a piece of writing, as an error. I also can't blame the students for communicating with their friends in a way that makes sense to them, and for sometimes slipping into that mode when writing for school. But it's probably premature to say that this is an evolution of language. It's a jargon created by a new communication technology, like the telegram. Perhaps it will fall by the wayside with changes in the technology. Or maybe it will become widespread and standard when the students of today are teachers.

A few years ago, after several weeks of grading papers filled with IM-speak and other jargon, Goodman took matters into her own hands.

When the students showed up for class the following day, she asked
them to read a paragraph she had written using many of the same
phrases they used in their papers.

"chaucer's the canterbury tales r a scathing attack on the catholic
church of the late 1300s . . . he uses the descriptions of many
pilgrims (including several very sketchy religious dawgs) 2 deliver a
veiled message about the mad corruption he like saw in the church the
greed that some of his characters have 4 money, represents like the
use of church scratch 2 build some pretty tight cathedrals."

I wonder what her point here actually was. I guess the point was just, stop writing this way. But wasn't the meaning still clear to the students, or perhaps even more clear than usual? And let's not forget that other jargons, legal for example, are probably more harmful to understanding than this will ever be.