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Donald Knuth: "Wanted: A Name For High-Tech Grief" (stanford.edu)
13 points by krs on Nov 15, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



"Microsoft"


hmm, gamers use "QQ" (due to the resemblance of tears coming from eyes), often in the context of "less qq, more pew pew" to communicate a lack of empathy.

Wikipedia has an entry for the term "computer rage": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_rage , which seems to have a certain amount of acceptance in the academic community, but it doesn't seem to have the ability to catch on (not going to say the m-word, not going to say the m-word...) the way "road rage" or "workaholic" do.

Notice that discussing ways of reducing this frustration are not part of the discussion.



tek-emo: depressed about technology.

bob was pretty tek-emo after his macbook battery exploded, his ipod hard drive fragged, his gmail accounts wiped, his facebook profile vandalized, and his WoW account stolen.


I'll raise the possibility of recycling the old "e" prefix, once more.

e-rage e-despair (e-spair?)

It might even be applied in initially unanticipated ways. E.g. e-lag (a takeoff of jet-lag): That tired, time-shifted feeling you get from 2 am "global" meetings, without the necessity of actually getting on a plane.

It also can be taken to refer to things electronic, in general. Thus it might well be retroactively applied to activities such as programming the VCR clock, and the like.

Whatever the phrase that sticks, an important component will be its easy pronunciation. "Road rage", "jet-lag". Simple and with preferred syllabic structure. For more on that, google some of Theo Vennemann's (linguist) work on optimal syllabic structures (I assume its out there somewhere).


Of the ones I've read, I think e-rage has the best chance of actually catching on.

You should send it to Dr. Knuth.


That was supposed to read:

e-rage

e-despair (e-spair?)

Not all on one line. Guess I'm experiencing a little e-rage over this non-intuitive aspect of the comment editor.


tech vex or tech tantrum


"tech strife"


You can't say strife without mentioning Gonads... and Strife

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/weeee


iHate




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