Pomospeak In Daily Life
Apr. 9th, 2008 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, this afternoon, I was signing up for a work-sponsored 20-minute course related to our new insurance policies. We have to go through this silly sign-in screen that our HR director (an ex-Softie) apparently cooked up as a way of tracking who had taken what courses.
As I'm signing up for it, I'm filling out an absurd number of fields. I ought to be able to give it my email address and it ought to be able to look up everything else: manager's name, email address, phone number, the works. They're all right there in the company directory; the fact that it can't is just... auuugh.
Anyway, as I'm filling it out, I notice at the bottom there's a field with no instructions as to how to fill it out, labeled Modality. I've seen that word a number of times, and always wondered what it meant. I went and looked it up:
As I'm signing up for it, I'm filling out an absurd number of fields. I ought to be able to give it my email address and it ought to be able to look up everything else: manager's name, email address, phone number, the works. They're all right there in the company directory; the fact that it can't is just... auuugh.
Anyway, as I'm filling it out, I notice at the bottom there's a field with no instructions as to how to fill it out, labeled Modality. I've seen that word a number of times, and always wondered what it meant. I went and looked it up:
Modality, n., a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans.As opposed to what, exactly? Nematodes? Butterflies? Ponies?
