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Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

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Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#181

Post by technofiend »

nimbius wrote: post #173
notacoward wrote: post #67

I've found that pretending to know someone's profession, or one related to it, is generally a very bad approach. It's easily seen through, at which point you're worse off than before. Instead, what I do with members of other professions is try to impress on them that I do not know their business but respect its complexity and our roles within the scenario. Whether it's a doctor or a plumber or even a computer technic…

Speaking as an automotive mechanic and a tradesman, nothing sounds more despicable than this half-ass attempt to "game" human interaction to save a few precious seconds in your day. You wouldn't do this with a doctor. You wouldn't do it with a police officer. So why do it with me? Or tech people? Are they somehow less impressive? I mean you are seeking their help. Maybe show some respect. if you're ever at the garage…

>Speaking as an automotive mechanic and a tradesman, nothing sounds more despicable than this half-ass attempt to "game" human interaction to save a few precious seconds in your day.

Doctors enjoy a higher reputation for "honesty and ethical standards" [1] and have the specter of medical malpractice if they yield a misdiagnosis, particularly if it's one that harms the patient. There is no equivalent for mechanics and frankly the public on average trusts mechanics far less than doctors. Auto mechanics got 32% in the high/very high trust category vs 67% for doctors in the latest Gallup poll. [1]

Anecdotally distrust of mechanics is such an issue I distinctly remember my youngest sister getting approached by car dealers from all over the city after she took auto shop in high school. She was told dealership repair shops needed women because some female customers simply didn't trust what they were being told by male repair shop representatives. Despite this apparent need the pay offered wasn't enough to entice her from just working at the O'Reilly Auto Parts down the street.

[1]

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions...

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#182

Post by artsyca »

cjfd wrote: post #65
lolcat5e wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise for Scheveningen (Dutch/German)

There is an even nicer word for dutch/german. slechtstschrijvende/schlechtstschreibende. Yes, 9 consonants in a row and you have to pronounce all of them like you are a beatboxer.

Yet I'm downvoted as usual the whole point of these shibboleths is that they're hard to pronounce but the LondonDerry/Derry example set forth is not hard to pronounce but based on cultural context anyone can call San Francisco "Frisco"

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#183

Post by laretluval »

FabHK wrote: post #135
freehunter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It doesn't matter if the word in English means the same thing as the original word, it doesn't matter what language it came from, it doesn't matter if we're combining two words from different languages to make a new word (television is the Greek word 'tele' combin…

Many languages adopt words, but English does so to an unusual degree. As a consequence, it is the language that has most words today, by far.

Is there a citation for that?

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#184

Post by TimTheTinker »

fortran77 wrote: post #136
crazygringo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this is a completely inaccurate generalization of both Jews and Christians, both of which are incredibly diverse populations with practices that vary incredibly widely by denomination, country/region and social group. Bible study groups are a common Christian thing in many, many churches, for one. Also, it's fairly loaded to suggest that Christians "appropriated" the Old Testament. Perhaps you could choose…

It is in poor taste to refer to the Hebrew Bible as the "old Testament."

It’s common usage within the Christian community to refer to it as such. Christianity’s roots are in Judaism - and that fact doesn’t constitute poor taste. So neither does using the Christian term for the Tanakh within a Christian context.

Now, knowingly calling it that to a Jew might possibly be interpreted as a form of disrespect, but in my experience most Jews don’t mind at all. It’s a shared scripture, so there’s common ground there regardless of the terms we use.

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#185

Post by lol768 »

whatshisface wrote: post #147
rdl wrote: post #25

Interesting USG shibboleths are using the correct acronyms, especially for insider stuff (TDY, "allowances", "authorities", and referring to NSA as NSA and not "the NSA", CIA as CIA and not "the CIA", State for "the State Department", etc.)

Is that good grammar? If you expand out the acronym you get "I work at National Security Administration," and if you remove the adjectives you get "I work at administration." Administration isn't a proper noun so that's why you would want to use "the." In electrical engineering you are supposed to say "DIP" which stands for dual inline package, but laymen tend to say "DIP Package" which expands out to "Dual inline pa…

>Is that good grammar?

No, but Americans seem to do it anyway.

You would definitely work at "the BBC" here.

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#186

Post by imgabe »

dqv wrote: post #163
mycall wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, once the customer threatened us with the note-taking act, we had to be extremely careful about anything that would admit fault, lest they try to use it against us later. That is hardly fair as the whole "this conversation may be recorded for training purposes" puts the caller on edge right from the start. Are they allowed to record the call too? Is that legal? Obviously, the caller should just record the c…

Maybe not in larger organizations, but in smaller ones those recordings really do get used for training purposes. And to verify claims about what agents say. I don't think the intent is to intimidate callers, but to let them know that something an agent says to them can be verified. I know it saved me before when someone claimed I was threatening them and using inappropriate language. >Is that legal? For the most par…

As a customer I would have zero expectation that the company would use one of their recordings to verify something in my favor.

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#187

Post by maccard »

btrettel wrote: post #132
fortran77 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And what really backfires is threatening to sue. In a company large enough to have a legal department, they'll hand you over to it, and basically nothing will get fixed. They'll record your complaints, dates, and times, and stop interacting with you.

This hasn't been my experience. I can recall one time where, after spending hours on the phone getting nowhere, I mentioned getting a lawyer involved. The company forwarded me to someone with a title like "solutions architect" who quickly solved the problem I was having. The other people I spoke with wouldn't even answer basic questions. It probably helped that the company is in a highly regulated industry.

I used to work in IT support. Maybe 3/4 times a year, we would get an irate customer who would drop mention of a lawyer, usually they were awkward and unhelpful in the first place. Our MO was to escalate to our legal team (who worked one day a week with us), run everything through them, and make no attempts to go above and beyond to remedy the issue. Every time, without fail, it would have been easier for everyone involved if you'd just treated me like a human being the first time around rather than barking at me and threatening to sue.

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#188

Post by exikyut »

Aeolun wrote: post #171
michannne wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do support along with my usual dev work and interface with users daily. I can't count the amount of times I've heard "I'm pretty sure it's because of..." followed by something completely unrelated, along with a stubborn resolve to not try the professional's recommended solution

I think I’m about 50/50 on thinking their solution is absolute bull and being right, and having made a retarded mistake and their solution solving everything.

This seems like a very scalable sane default presumption, in any case.

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#189

Post by acqq »

netcan wrote: post #172
80386 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. laoned idioms are inherently exotic, and this one is worth demystifying Until a few decades ago, it was assumed in educated Protestant society that everyone was familiar with the Bible. So a lot of biblical idioms are still present.

Hmm. I now just realized that the biblical translators must have chosen to transliterate the word, not translate it. It's probably because in context its about how the word is pronounced, not meaning. In any case, I guess the idiom would have never taken off with the word "corn."

You can compare the different translations, even through the centuries, here:

Vulgate, cc 4th century CE:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A5-6...

Luther, 1545:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v...

King James Bible (1611):

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v...

Septuagint (the Greek translation, older than all above, around 3rd century BCE) didn't keep that word as is:

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/shibboleth-in-the-se...

"the LXX scholars had difficulties translating the Hebrew word שבלת Shibboleth into Greek, for the simple reason, Greek lacks the phoneme [ʃ]"

Re: Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

#190

Post by PascLeRasc »

whatshisface wrote: post #147
rdl wrote: post #25

Interesting USG shibboleths are using the correct acronyms, especially for insider stuff (TDY, "allowances", "authorities", and referring to NSA as NSA and not "the NSA", CIA as CIA and not "the CIA", State for "the State Department", etc.)

Is that good grammar? If you expand out the acronym you get "I work at National Security Administration," and if you remove the adjectives you get "I work at administration." Administration isn't a proper noun so that's why you would want to use "the." In electrical engineering you are supposed to say "DIP" which stands for dual inline package, but laymen tend to say "DIP Package" which expands out to "Dual inline pa…

The more common ones I hear are "PCB board" and "MCU microcontroller". "CAD design" used to bother me too, but I think it's become its own legitimate term for the sub-genre of CAD, since we're used to also using Solidworks for stress analysis or simulations.
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