When a Tech 'Breakthrough' Isn't Really

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'More than 8,600 press releases have been issued over the years with "breakthrough" in the headline, a majority of them by computer and electronics companies,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. He examines whether hyperbole and hype has robbed the term of much of its meaning, focusing on a recently announced 'breakthrough' by Intel involving optical computing. From the article: 'Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous.'"

This story is AMAZING

I was so excited when I RTFA that I immediately had to post a comment saying that this is simply the BEST article that I have ever read on Slashdot and it will probably be seen as THE breakthrough in human-to-human communications that we have all been waiting for.
I am not exaggerating

Past Tense & Specificity

The word 'breakthrough' is definitely used too much.

I'm always skeptical when it's used in a present tense. For example, "The Segway is a breakthrough in transportation technology."

When the Segway first premiered, I heard this. Yet, it has been anything but a 'breakthrough' nor has it changed my life in anyway (with the exception of some humor at the Segway's expense).

My point is that you can only really use the term in the past tense when something really did signal a breakthrough. Like the invention of solid state transistors. At the time, did they really realize how big it was? Maybe, but that's not always the case.

Breakthroughs are also sometimes relative, for instance Srgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band might have been a musical breakthrough for rock but mean little to computer scientists. Likewise, proving Fermat's last theorem might have been a breakthrough for mathematics but meant little or nothing to a musician.

So, in the end, I think 'breakthrough' is used prematurely but it also is used relative to fields a lot. I don't think the author bothered to look at the thousands of uses of the word to see if it was followed by "for physicists" or "for medicine" in which case they might have been genuine breakthroughs in that sense. The difficult breakthroughs are the ones that do affect everyone (like the transistor or radio) but they are becoming harder to pinpoint as many inventions these days aren't actual inventions but instead integration of already existing inventions to form a new utility for those devices.

Re:Past Tense & Specificity

Lots of words have been pounded into dust:

Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).

Genius - Used to be someone who was consistantly and spectacularly intelligent (Einstein, Fermi, etc). Now it is anyone who happens to figure something out or is relatively smart. "My 3 year old can hum the national anthem, isn't he a genius?"

Star - Anyone who is appearing on your show or in your movie. "We have a star on our show tonight, Zsa Zsa Gabor!"

He's using the wrong definition

To an MBA, a "breakthrough" is anything that will make them more money (or in the case of marketing, anything that they *hope* will make them more money).

Press Releases

Most people read mainstream news stories, not press releases directly. So as long as reporters do their job and use the term "breakthrough" appropriately it won't lose its meaning.

Just consider the definition

Breakthrough: any significant or sudden advance, development, achievement, or increase, as in scientific knowledge or diplomacy, that removes a barrier to progress.

As long as there are barriers to progress (and they never seem to run out) we will have breakthroughs. As the saying goes: "If the Shoe Fits..."

"breakthrough" is no breakthrough itself...

The word "breakthrough" is actually no breakthrough itself. For years companies have used keywords to attract attention in consummer aspects. It was done years ago when companies used the word "Extreme" in absolutely everything that was being released to the public. (I wonder where Billy got his inspiration for W!ndows XP). By the end of the 90s everyone was using words like "Millenium" (LOL) and numbers like 2000; Example: "PruductName 2000! Out this Fall". And so the word "breakthrough" is nothing more than a marketing decision for some companies today.

Contradiction?

The FA is stating that we overuse the "breakthrough" word to advertize a tech that is still years away from market, and of course editors are happy to show us another great story.

Breakthroughs ARE More Common

As technology helps make new technology, it is expected for progress to hasten. So major milestones are reached more often and more quickly. Using press releases as a litmus test to measure claims of "breakthroughs" is a little much to ask, IMO. I expect a press release to be biased and grandiose - there's no surprise there. So while maybe the term "breakthrough" is being used a little liberally by corporations looking for investment, I fully expect to see major milestones reached at an accelerating pace.

Two sides...

There are two sides to this...

First off, more breakthroughs than ever are being made these days. Our technological advances are being made at an almost "silly" rate. We have made so many more in the past century than in the millenium that preceeded it. Why? Better education, greater body of knowledge, and of course computing doesn't hurt. So yes, there are alot of breakthroughts taking place.

However, the term is also used as marketing hype. It still has a buzz to it after all these years of being misused, so I don't think companies will stop using it as a marketing scheme.

In reference to IBM in the article... they certainly use the term "breakthrough", and much of what they do deserves recognition as such as they have pushed the envelope with their R&D. Of course Intel has also done a fantastic job. Some of what these companies do isn't necessary ground breaking work, as it has been done before. So I find it difficult to determine if the term should be used still since the work has been done before, but the difference is that when one of these large companies does it, it is so much more likely to succeed.

I disagree

Actually in my opinion we haven't really made much progress in the recent decade at all.

1942 manhattan project
1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki
1947 transistor invented
1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled
1951 electricity from nuclear power plant
1952 US Airforce orders B52
1955 U2 Tested
1956 first O/S
1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik
1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP
1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS
1962 spacewar computer game
1964 computer mouse & windows
1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more
1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight
1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight
1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage
1969 Jul first man on moon
1969 Multics
1971 intel 4004
1972 C
1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started
1974 Altair and Scelbi
1975 apollo & soyuz dock
1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched
1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore
1978 visicalc, vi
1979 wordstar
1980 TCP/IP RFCs
1981 space shuttle, IBM PC
1982 BSD gets TCP/IP
1983 Apple Lisa
1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs"
1983 GNU project
1984 Apple Mac, X Windows
1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows
#Stagnation starts
1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up
1988 stealth fighter
1989 stealth bomber
1990 WWW (hypertext revisited)
1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash)
1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD
1993 Mosaic
1994 webcrawler
1995 Windows 95, Altavista
1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash)
1997 google (good but not really a great leap )
2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers

Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.

As for aerospace:

All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.

They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?

Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).

Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.

Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.

Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.

They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.

AI has been a field for bullshit artists.

But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.

Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.

Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.

Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not

Re:I disagree

True breakthroughs in technology are best identified the way economists identify recessions -- that is to say after the fact.

The biggest innovations come from basic research, and one of the common characteristics of basic research is that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, they're just looking.

Just look at some of the examples you point to that we use in everyday life. The way in which most of the western world functions right now would be substantially different without all sorts of things that people barely noticed at the time researchers discovered the last piece that fell into place to make it a reality.

No, we don't have a cure for cancer yet, but there's no saying that when a cure for cancer comes around it won't turn out that the discovery depended on technologies developed over the last 25 years.

For a perfect example, look at RSA encryption. The major innovation of RSA was to pair together a couple of extremely old math tricks that had previously been thought of as cute but useless. Does that mean that the breakthrough for RSA should be credited to Fermat or Sun Tzu? It certainly took until the last few decades to recognize the value of their work...
-JMP

This isn't a breakthrough

If the headline "This isn't a breakthrough" were used, it'd still show up in the list of headlines with the word breakthrough, right? :)

Ten year factor...

According to one of my college instructor, most technologies have been around for at least ten years before the public becomes aware of it. The internet is a great example of a technology developed in 1969 that didn't become widely available to the public until 1995. So a technological breakthrough is all relative.

Semantics

The problem is that the word "breakthrough" has more than one meaning.

1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A military offensive that penetrates an enemy's lines of defense.
3. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
(From www.answers.com)

Press release writers can legitimately use the word to mean the first definition (a solution to a problem), while implying the third (emotive, hyperbolic) definition even if it doesn't actually mean it. As such, it is a very useful word to make your company look like it is leaping ahead of the competition and deserving of funding, whereas a press release which sticks to practical unemotive language and doesn't "big-up" the company is wasting an opportunity to generate interest and investment.
No wonder it's an overused word - it makes your company money.

wrong crowd

This is the wrong crowd to preach that to ("isn't linux awesomely innovative and new? UNIX? no, never heard of it")

It's not just the word "breakthrough"

I'm glad to see article like this.

I actually do research in optical computing, but the problems aren't unique to that field. I'm always getting pressured to use words/phrases like "novel", "highly accurate", "unique", etc (basically just non quantitative positive adjectives) to make the titles of my talks or publications more sexy or provocative.

It's annoying becuase they are just noise words. If something is really unique, a breakthrough, etc, those adjectives will be applied to your product (research, idea technology, choose your noun here) by others. Your job as an engineer or scientist should be to report the facts on your (noun here) in an unbiased and neutral fashion, giving meaningful benchmark figures regarding what it allows you to do. It's okay to focus on the strengths, but provide quantitative data, not meaningless adjectives and buzzwords. Fortunately more and more journals are stating not to use such meaningless drivel in their guidelines.

In my research, whenever I see phrases like "good/excellent agreement with...", instead of "this shows a standard deviation of X%", I automatically assume someone is just putting a shine on lame results. This prejudice is pretty accurate, but of course not 100% so. I'd estimate 90% or so.

The problem of course is the overly strong influence marketing has on us. Richard Feynman had a pretty good rant about this stuff. We really need to start punishing people/institutions for insulting our intelligence with this noise. He was more concerned with advertising campaigns which insult our intelligence, but the same trend has broadened itself.

In the end, I think it's important we become more cognisant, thus more resistant, to transparent marketing techniques. When an institution is singing its own praises, be skeptical.

On a tangent, if someone tells you "this is a quantum leap in XXX!", reply "so you mean to say it's the smallest possible change you can make?"

Re:It's not just the word "breakthrough"

There's a simple test for this. Take a book written from a hundred years ago. Most of the time you will see far more complex use of language, with extensive use of appositives and panrentheticals, that actually can take much effort to parse, leave alone comprehend. Now being hard to read doesn't necessarily make something better, and maybe we are just better at communicating clearly, but I have found the these older texts often are really that much better. Compare "The Wind in the Willows" or even "Winnie the Pooh" to anything written for kids in the last 50 years... I think our use of language is deteriorating significantly. Compare the speeches of Presidents Bush or Clinton to those of, say, Churchill or Lincoln. You will find that even when modern speeches are succinct and inspiring, as some of Bush's have been, or long and detailed, as most of Clinton's were, that the eloquence and beauty of orations from past generations simply do not exist any more.

The very existence of widespread grammar and spelling errors (e.g., loose/lose, would of/would have, pluralizing with apostrophes) demonstrates to me that most people don't read very much if at all. Now good spelling is not always correlated with being well-read (one of the smartest and most well-read people, more well-read than I, that I know is a horrible speller), but when I see people claiming that they get all the useful information they need from sites like Digg or /., I can only conclude that those kinds of people are doomed to communicate at a highly illiterate level in perpetuity. Even if you were to read extensively from common magazines and newspapers, you will not be exposed to anything more than a very fundamental (read: 6th grade) level of proficiency with the language.

I've been recently reading a book of lectures given by Max Planck in the early 1900's. While the scientific content the first couple lectures isn't above anything a typical high-schooler could (or should) be able to understand, I found the level of sophistication of his language to be surprisingly high, and yet I get the feeling that this was typical in that context for 100 years ago. Maybe we are just better at speaking succinctly... I think that is in some part true... but mostly I think we are simply losing our ability to express ourselves as well as our forefathers, that we lack much of their skill to communicate nuance and abstraction.

A good recent example is the Pope's speech that caused such a stir. Now plenty of folks use any excuse imaginable to attack the Pope, and I doubt few if any of the people reacting with anger or violence even read (or even _could_ read) His Holiness' speech in its context and entirety. However, I cannot imagine that anyone with the capacity and will to actually understand what was said would respond with any criticism the like of which we've heard over the past few weeks. I found myself wishing for a thorough grounding in philosophy because I knew I was missing many of the implications of the Holy Father's words. My degree in Computer Science has done almost nothing to prepare me to consider the significance of Hellenistic thought and its relation and importance to modern faith.

Does it matter? It should, but public perception, as ignorant as it may be, ends up having a much stronger effect regardless of whether it is based on fact or not, and those people, civic, religious leaders or anyone with an opinion, who have something nontrivial to say will suffer, as do we all, from a society that is indifferent, or even hostile, to in-depth communication or a use of language beyond that of a small child.

You may have noticed that His Holiness expressed his sorrow for how his speech was received, not what he said. Far from being the usual weaselly apology of a politician who is only sorry he was caught, Pope Benedict correctly expressed the fact that the people who were angry did not, in fact, understand what he was trying to say. Could he have prevented this misunderstanding? Probably, but

We are aproaching the Technological Singularity

So we will be getting more and more "breakthroughs" measured by last century's scientific performance, every day.

Here for a description of the Technological Singularity [wikipedia.org] in Wikipedia.

Breakthrough is broken

Can we also add "Revolutionary" to the list?

Tech / Science Reporting

The reporters talk to researchers. Naturally, the researchers are excited about what they're doing, and the vision they have of what could happen. I think the reporters get caught up in that.

Like everyone else, all I can think is Segway

A breakthrough is

1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.

While optical computing is a neato thing and it will probably make a splash in the computer world by enabling high performance systems to basically do things faster, is it really going to change the way we do computing? I mean, over the years, we have changed the way we do computing from a hardware standpoint. Things have advanced, technologies have come and gone and we have seen great strides in manufacturing techniques that have given us very small systems that you can carry in your pocket. But have we really changed the way we do the computing or are we just advancing hardware?

Optical computing isn't really a breakthrough in the sense that it will make such a difference that we will have to rethink how we program systems to utilize this technology the best that we can. Then again, much of the things being listed as breakthroughs really aren't.

What would it take to make a breakthrough? Well, cars that drive themselves safely and reliably. That would be a breakthrough because it would defintly change habits for people. Cheap, affordable space travel would be a breakthrough because it would change how we traverse the globe and even open space. Those are just a couple of things that would make an impact that could be considered a breakthrough. They would not only change the way we do things but they would also progress technology by making it available to a general consumer. That means profit margins which bring dollars for R&D to continually improve the technology.

Optical computing is, again, a nice advancement but a breakthough, unlikely. It's not changing how we do something, it's just offering a different approach and it won't advance anything until it gets cheaper but, by then, it'll be eclipsed by the next "breakthrough". In the same line of thought, the biggest blunder of a breakthrough in recent history is the Segway. While yeah it is a neat idea, it's not going to change anything. It amounts to nothing more than a scooter with a gyroscope in it and if the idea was so great to begin with, wouldn't we be using scooters already? There are just inherent problems with the idea because there are sacrifices and concessions that need to be made just to make the statement that the Segway will change cities forever. Where is the incentive to make that change? A Segway isn't a breakthrough because it's answering a question that nobody asked.

Cure cancer, that's a breakthrough. Solve traffic congestion, big deal. It will be a temporary fix until more people get Segways and just move the congestion to a different area. Along the same lines, find a way to use a different sepectrum of light to build a laser that at least triples the density of media storage space, that's a breakthrough. It changed everything from how we watch movies to how we store pictures of little Jimmy and little Sally on thier first day of school. It also advanced technology forcing the rest of the industry to find ways to use that technology to the best of its ability. It also changed other industries because now people have the ability to store large amounts of data. That changed everything from DVD players to digital cameras and we are seeing gear that is not afraid to use large amounts of space to provide much more content because there is media out there that can handle it. Finding a way to make a computer run faster, that's not necessarily a breakthrough. All the major chip manufacturers have been doing that for decades. Using optics is just a different way, not a breakthrough.

1947

Imagine it is 1947...

"A Bell spokesman says the development of the transistor is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world electronic circuity can be made with germanium. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before personal computing becomes ubiquitous.'"

The real breakthroughs do not have any direct, short-term effect on our lives. Instead, they happen in a theoretical setting and they eventually lead to giant shifts in real world technology. Apple moving to a 60GB iPod which is slighty smaller is not a breakthrough. But a practical way to build optical circuitry? That sounds like one of the few times the word truly should be applied.

Deflation of discoveries

I gues nowadays more breakthroughs are needed to produce something new...

Thoreau had something to say about this:

"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Thoreau, of course, was a technologist and business entrepreneur whose process for combining clay with graphite was a breakthrough in the development of pencil "lead..."

hype

Isn't "hype" just an abbreviation of "hyperbole" ? In which case, the phrase "hyperbole and hype" is just unnecessarily re-stating the same thing again more than once without need in a tautological fashion.

Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of abuse of the Queen's English going on. To some extent it's understandable. The world has more "newspapers" (real and virtual) than ever before, but stuff is happening at pretty much the same rate as ever; which means that, in order to fill more papers, the news being reported is going to be less interesting. But people are only interested in headlines and soundbites, so everything has to be exaggerated to make it sound more interesting.

One thing I have noticed is that in English, we put the modifier before the modified word (adjective before noun, adverb before verb &c.) and we also put the given name before the family name. Therefore, the second word of a phrase tends to be the important one. Repeat a phrase such as "binge drinking" or "illegal immigrant" often enough, and pretty soon the second word will start automatically bringing to mind the first -- in other words, when you hear "drinking" you will associate it with "binge drinking", when you hear "immigrant" you will think "illegal immigrant" and so on.

THRILLER

It's the same as "Thriller" for a movie.

It used to mean that, well, a movie "thrilled."

It's become so overused now that it can only be taken to mean a genre of movie, and not as an adjective describing it.

-------------
Web Thinkers Congregate here [htpp]

Breakthrough = Break + Through

People seems to use too many words without really considering what they are, what they mean and where they come from. Breakthrough is just one more example.

Borrowing from another example, lets go back to the solid state transistors. At the time, there was a barrier for semiconductor based technology. Transistors made it possible to (here we go) break through that barrier. Not just some concept, or exciting tecnology or invention.

I don't know how much of a barrier this (borrowing again) semiconductor laser from Intel is breaking. I for one have been hearing about second order optical polymers for quite a few years (10+ years at least), and even saw some in action. It really didn't break any real barriers into optical computing (we need 3rd order optical polymers for that) so, again, I'm a little skeptic about this being a "breakthrough". What king of "new horizons" does it open for us ? Yes, it made things easier, for sure, but a breakthrough ? Please, show me the barrier.

I, for one, has stopped hoping reporters and PR people to use the language correctly a long time ago. Which is really said. You expect IT people to use computers (their tool of work) correctly.

Not just products, what about humans?

How many times have I seen people describe themselves as "intelligent", "successful", "ambitious", "funny", "creative", "outgoing", "easy going"? And here's the best part: on dating platforms, they're all 'looking for bf/gf just like me'.

Puh lease.

It's a fair word to use, under some circs.

If you have a problem that lots of people are working on, and nobody is making consistent progress solving, and then someone does, that person has broken through a developmental bottleneck. That's a breakthrough. But, like the evolution/creation fight over what 'theory' means, there's a popular-advertising/research fight over what a 'breakthrough' is, insofar as they happen all the time, at an increasing rate, as technology advances, but the word is still regarded by the public as being something monumental. It IS monumental, to the people in that very specific field of study, but since there are so many more areas of active research these days, it is much less monumental to the world as a whole than a breakthrough was 50 years ago, or 100.
Languages change, culture changes, connotations of individual words change. Otherwise I would have to drive a chariot -- sorry, coegi plaustrum -- to work every day.

This is new?

Doesn't everyone tend to just skim past this kind of verbal garbage these days? Even non-marketing/advertising people talk like that now. Sometimes, I think it is a company directive to use certain language in describing the company's product or processes.

I remember LOL at a radio interview a few years ago of a Microsoft Office project manager talking about making changes to their document format, ostensibly to make improvements, but mostly just to keep OpenOffice users from opening word documents. The quote: "We want to be able continue to innovate our document format." Holy hyperbole! Now "innovate" means merely "improve" or, more accurately here, "change"?

On slashdot

Every one of those 8400 breakthroughs got front page billing.
On slashdot, breakthroughs are lauded no matter how trivial. It is considered a breakthrough for the space elevator when they reach a consensus on what muzak will be playing over the elevators speakers.

I get sick of news of future breakthroughs

I know the companies need to get word out about their projects to get investments, but you get jaded when they say these technologies are coming, but 3 years later you look back and it never happened. Give me news on things that are really happening, not what might happen.

What is it coming to?

They just don't make genuine [slashdot.org] breakthroughs like they used to.

Can You Really Blame Them?

Articles with buzzwords like "breakthrough" are written to get attention. Do you blame them? That is the PR person's job.

If the article headline was "Intel Tries Something with Optical Computing" then it wouldn't catch as many eyeballs.

People love to blame the media for their overuse of buzzwords, exaggeration of truths, and focusing on petty things like celebrity's lives. But remember it is us who read/buy/click based on their headlines, and sadly it works.

If they didn't do it, we wouldn't read/buy/click, and that media outlet would struggle while all the others succeed.

Moo

Now, if we can just change the word "priority" to be useful again.

*Someone* has to say it...

"You keep using sat word. I don sink it means what you sink it means."
-- Inigo Montoya

While I'm at it, another one:

"A word means what I say it means. Nothing more and nothing less."
--Tweedledum

Face it, folks, between politics and marketing, nothing really "means" anything anymore.

Nothing new here

Awesome products rarely inspire much actual awe. Gigantic things are rarely of adequate size for giants. Fantastic holidays never seem much like a trip to some kind of fantasy land to me. Massive is often applied to things without mass, such as savings on sale items.

It's actually hard to express yourself when you really need to evoke some kind of extra-ordinary image with an adjective.

I have noticed that a lot of companies are no longer satisfied with supplying you with a simple product any more either. They feel the need to give you an "experience", or make everything an "event". Well, the experience of shaving with your razor was pleasant enough but I was really just looking for something to trim my beard thanks.

How about a breakthrough in journalism standards..

Paragraph 10 of TFA:

Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous. An Intel spokesman says the laser chip is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon.

Has anyone else noticed how lazy and sloppy people have gotten with writing because of the internet? I keep seeing "stream of consciousness" posts and NEWS ARTICLES that are grammatical and spelling nightmares simply because the writer figures the reader will "get the idea."

This is a WSJ columnist who apparently couldn't be bothered to read though his article after writing it. It would be one thing if this was some sort of breaking news and he wanted the scoop (internet news reporting is a minute-to-minute effort) - but this article is by no means time sensitive.

What does this mean for the future of proper writing? If actual paid journalists are sounding more and more like posters on a Paris Hilton fansite forum, we are in big trouble.

In the bathroom at work....

...I read this [newscientist.com] in New Scientist...

WHAT makes a scientific paper "surprising" or "unexpected"? Michal Jasienski believes the rapid increase in the frequency of these words in papers' titles is simply a bid by the authors to stand out amid the deluge of publications."

"If grabbing attention is the goal, it is not working. Jasienski took a sample of 100 "surprising" papers and found that on average they were cited by other researchers no more often than 100 matched papers from the same journals."

...just the other day. Something to ponder on.

This is what i do:

I never purchase products, described as "breakthrough", "revolutionary", "amazing" and "miracle". These words are the warning sings of crap.