Oh, man. The worst is when the IT guys know & want to do the right thing but are unable to do so because of stupid policies and no budget.
At my last job I had to spoof a MAC address and install my own router because their "system" would boot your MAC address off the "allowed" list if you didn't log on in the office every so often. I never figured out how long "every so often" was, but, since I telecommuted, I didn't make the quota.
When the IT guy saw my setup, he just said "I didn't see that!" and shook his head. I swear, IT-wise, it was like working in a particularly boring episode of Hogan's Heroes.
The other office "banned" all outside email. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, you name it. Except ... the other office was in Europe, and everyone's phone could read email. So instead of people taking little breaks to check personal email during the day, they take LONGER to go outside and check it on their mobiles.
@#358/patgreene -- many, many books on word and phrase origins are collections of funny stories that have little or no basis in fact ... a good debunking book is Dave Wilton's Word Myths (where he talks about my favorite insidious cabal, CANOE -- The Conspiracy to Attribute Nautical Origins to Everything). A good book on How Etymology Works is Anatoly Liberman's Word Origins (And How We Know Them) -- he shows how & when you can 'know' where a word came from, and gives examples of Bad Etymological Practices to Avoid.
Disclaimer: I nagged both these guys to write their books, so I am probably not the most unbiased recommender.
And on the "avoid citing" list: any dictionary of slang that primarily cites OTHER dictionaries of slang, or that gives no citations at all, merely a list of terms.
Any dictionary that capitalizes all of the headwords, regardless of whether they are capitalized in use, is a Not-As-Useful-As-It-Could-Be book.
Anyone who uses Strunk & White as an excuse to edit all the entertaining bits out of other peoples' writing should be taken out behind the library and beaten to death with a copy. Which would take a long time, as it's so small ...
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