{"id":796,"date":"2013-04-23T19:23:06","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T00:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=796"},"modified":"2013-04-23T19:23:06","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T00:23:06","slug":"boostrapping-on-a-shoestring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=796","title":{"rendered":"Boostrapping on a Shoestring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a post involving beer all set to go, but I had a bit of a traumatic experience today, so I’m going to talk about that instead.\u00a0 I won’t go into details, on the vanishingly small chance that the responsible parties might read this, but during a meeting for the ol’ day job, I was told to “synergistically onboard people to grow my network.”\u00a0 Now, that wasn’t all that bad, though one could argue that verbing a propositional adjective phrase is more troublesome than the standard verbing of nouns.\u00a0 And obviously, one “builds” networks from all these onboarded people, one does not “grow” them. \u00a0 And clearly, in this context, “synergistic” is meaning-free, so the speaker would have been better off substituting it with some foul piece of profanity just to jazz things up a bit.\u00a0 But I can handle all that, and better writers than I have complained extensively about such things.\u00a0 No, what stuck in my mind was a few seconds later, when I was instructed to “bootstrap them through the network”.<\/p>\n

This will not stand.<\/p>\n

As frequent readers will know, I’m basically a descriptivist, and I can chuckle indulgently (albeit through clenched teeth) at people who somehow think that using a perfectly serviceable phrase like “bring in” or “find” is boring and feel the need to spruce things up with a rather opaque and clumsy word – such is the price of low self-esteem.\u00a0 But these theoretical frequent readers will also know that the misuse of metaphor<\/a> really grinds <\/a>my gears <\/a>(so to speak).<\/p>\n

\"boothooks\"So let us explore “bootstrap”, in case any managers happen to be reading this.\u00a0 It’s a word that probably wouldn’t get much use these days, since boots that have them are less common.\u00a0 But in brief, it is that little strap at the top rear of, say, a combat boot, or on either side of the top of a cowboy boot.\u00a0 In a non-metaphoric sense, they are used to help a person pull on their boots, possibly using a boot hook.\u00a0 The primary metaphor involving bootstraps is “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” – in other words to get into or out of a situation using only the resources at hand, with no outside help.\u00a0 This, of course, led to all sorts of secondary metaphors, such as “bootstrap loading” (or “booting”) where hardware kicks off the initial software being loaded onto a computer, and “bootstrapping” a set of data by resampling from it over and over to obtain better estimates of summary statistics.<\/p>\n

The point being – once you get outside the concrete world of actually pulling on boots, anything involving bootstrapping, by definition, can’t involve outside intervention, no matter what.\u00a0 So telling me to “bootstrap” someone is not only not meaningful, it is precisely the opposite of meaningful.\u00a0 It has negative meaning, and I am slightly dumber for having heard it used thus.\u00a0 So I reiterate my plea: if you don’t know what a bootstrap is, just don’t use the word.\u00a0 Assuming we’re dealing with English here, we’ve got more words than we know what to do with, so a) there is no shame in not knowing what the odd one means, and b) there is likely a perfectly good alternative lying around ready to be used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a post involving beer all set to go, but I had a bit of a traumatic experience today, so I’m going to talk about that instead.\u00a0 I won’t go into details, on the vanishingly small chance that the responsible parties might read this, but during a meeting for the ol’ day job, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar-gripery","category-metaphor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}