Ridiculously Lean

Xerox brags about how much time they're going to save P&G:

Using Lean Six Sigma-based methodologies, Xerox Global Services will deliver an enterprise-wide strategy, expected to free up hundreds of minutes of employee time annually.

I can't figure out any way to legitimately read that sentence to mean "hundreds of minutes of time per employee," can you?

So it's time to get out the calculator.

Given that P&G has 138,000 employees, even if we're as generous as we can be and call it nine-hundred and ninety nine minutes, that still works out to less than half a second per employee, per year...

But how much time is really spent waiting for laserprints of regular Office documents anyway? Not much, compared to how much time a large design firm spends spooling gigabytes to presentation printers.

New Features In Adobe Illustrator CS3

From the Help pages:

Work more fluidly and efficiently without waiting for Illustrator to catch up with your hands and your thoughts. The underlying architecture of Illustrator has been improved. You’ll notice increased scroll and zoom times...

I can vouch for the increased zoom times, but it's a bit odd they'd tout this as a feature...

Si usted no entiende la etiqueta...

Really funny text below the Caution Statement on this label for Clorox Disinfecting Kitchen Cleaner. Everything that appears on the label in English also appears in Spanish, so I'm not sure why they'd need to single out their Spanish speaking consumers to tell them what they should do if they couldn't understand it.

Torschlusspanik

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors is a nice take by John Tierney on the power of letting go -- accepting realistic limits on how many possible futures you can entertain.

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

And thanks to Time putting some of its archives online, I can provide the name for the trope of the closing door: Torschlusspanik, as felt in East Germany, 1961:

Last week a curious and serious malady was affecting Communist East Germany and reaching almost epidemic proportions. The name of the disease was Torschlusspanik, which literally means "fear of gate closing." Everything East German leaders did to shut off the flow of refugees to the West seemed, instead, to spur it on.

So the fear of a closing gate spurs people to finally take the hard path to the desired outcome.

There seems to be a lot of Torschlusspanik in the air these days.

more tropes

Tropes of the Times -- words which occur more frequently in the NY Times than anywhere else.

• madeleines


• donnybrook


• hardscrabble


• hustings

more?

Scutching

My wife's family uses the verb scutch exclusively to mean "to enjoin," as in "Mom was scutching me to get my homework done before dinner." Sort of like the evidently related heckle, but with the object of improving the person whom you are addressing. It was just one of those family words.
Then I came across a brochure for an old-timey "Flax Scutching Festival" in Pennsylvania, and the etymological mystery was solved. The root, physical meaning is to beat stalks of flax to obtain fibers which can be made into linen. The metaphorical meaning is thus, to abuse, with the intention of a practical improvement to the abused object...
Above are two images from the brochure, illustrating scutching, and also the root, physical meaning of "to heckle," which looks painful too.
So many words have drifted this way, concrete meanings suggesting metaphorical ones, until in time the metaphorical meaning obliterates the concrete one. Few English speakers make flax into linen any more, but many have the experience of bothering someone to their betterment, or of being so bothered.
As far as I know, this is an undocumented usage of the word, and I do not know of anyone outside my wife's family who uses the word this way. I would appreciate feedback if you have also heard this usage.

Yes

It's really true about surgery these days; everyone shows up asking you for your full name and birth date, and why you're here today, and which knee it is that they're going to operate on.

And someone really did inscribe the word "yes" on me, like a charm, to affirm to all who could see that I was going to get arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Without seeing the charm, the surgeon cannot make the cut.