Has anyone heard the acronym FUD, meaning "fear, uncertainty and doubt"? It's apparently part of the vernacular of the high-tech world.

I fear I am uncertain about (no doubt) this word.

I get 234,000 pertinent hits

Here is what Wikipedia says, "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative and vague or inaccurate information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe misinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly." It apparently was first used by Gene Amdahl, after he left IBM to found his own company. Apparently the definition has broadened, and it even has been used to describe political strategies.

According to wwftd, in Scotish or British dialects it means "1) the backside or rump 2) the tail of a hare or rabbit." Is that true?

quote:

Originally posted by wordnerd:
... the acronym FUD ...

I've never heard it before, but it looks like a euphemism for a certain four-letter word: "Oh, fud ..."

Tinman

Not to be confused with FOD, which is what gets sucked into jet engines, causing the pilot to say, "FUD..."

quote:

According to wwftd, in Scotish or British dialects it means "1) the backside or rump 2) the tail of a hare or rabbit." Is that true?

I've certainly never used it, or heard it, but there are plenty of dialect words I'm unfamiliar with. Are you saying you don't trust tsuwm?

Oh, no...I usually trust tsuwm (remember, he does include epicaricacy in his dictionary ). I just wondered if you use the word fud to mean "backside" or "rump" in England.

Is it any relation to Elmer Fudd, Buggs Bunny's nemesis? Also, why don't we have the acronym, "FAL," for Fear and Loathing, as made popular by Hunter S. Thompson?

I hear FUD used and have used it myself. It's a rather common acronym in certain sectors of the IT industry in the US, especially amongst Open Source advocates and fellow travellers though it seems to predate the movement. It's hard not to associate it with the character of Elmer Fudd from the Warner Bros cartoons, but it being close in sound to a certain four-letter word probably also helps. I don't think it has anything to do with British English dialectal words but wait standing to be corrected. It's just another acronym in a sea of such in IT.

While all occupations have their own lingo, I think that IT people have developed an extraordinarily specialized vernacular in such a short time. I am not sure how positive that is because I think it limits general communication.

I am not sure how positive that is because I think it limits general communication.

Not really, unless the IT-speaker only speakscomputer jargon. Amongst my peers, it would reduce communication. It's the same with the particular speech of other groups: sports fanatics, farmers, biotech folks, and word people. It's just that sometimes IT folks sometimes forget that not all people online speak the same language.

Yes, I agree. I find IT people at help desks or 1-800 numbers to be nearly impossible to understand because they can't speak in general terms. While my profession has a lot of its own lingo, we don't use it with our patients (or at least we try not to). Now, Zmj, I am not talking about you. Your communication skills are obviously excellent, but that's not true of many people in IT...and most whom I've come in contact with.

I did once come across one IT person who was trying to help me with a problem. He obviously understood my IT knowledge base and told me to type in "www period blah blah blah." I had to laugh that in this day and age he thought I didn't know that "dot" meant "period." I have to give him credit, though, for trying to be clear!

Speaking of specialized lingo, there was a hilarious Cathy cartoon (which I can't find online) where 2 guys had a very nice conversation about electronics...only speaking with abbreviations.

It seems to me that a common assumption is that IT folks speak the way the do to obfuscate the content of their discussion and confuse the non-IT folks. I believe this is incorrect. Much of the specialized vocabulary of computers does not have non-technical equivalents in non-IT speech. Some do. For instance, I can tell somebody to type a URL into their web browser, or I can call the URL a web address and the web browser Explorer. But, if I need to talk of printer drivers, there's really no other synonym for this important piece of the OS (operating system). I can circumlocute I suppose, and paraphrase what a printer driver is, but non-IT folks are just as unlikely to understand me when I say "a piece of software that allows communication between a certain printer and the computer's OS". A lot of the vocabulary of IT is not opaque to people in the same way that thieves' cant is from the rest of us. We all know what a pick pocket is, but because many people have no clue what a computer is or how it works, they don't really know what many of its constituent parts are. Not at any deep level, at least. That's why I had to laugh out loud when I saw somebody at a computer trade show wearing a t-shirt which read: "No, I will not fix your computer."

And as for the medical profession, I have usually found that I can speak with nurses, but doctors speak to me as though I am a four-year old. That is one reason I'm happy with my current primary care physician: he speaks with me about medical matters at a level that demeans neither of us, determining if I don't know something and describing what it is.

I must agree with zmj. I am not a computer expert, but I have a pretty good knowledge of what goes on in Windows. Some people I know seem to have some sort of perverse pride in not knowing or caring how their computer works. In particular, my brother, sister, and one friend are helpless when their computer doesn't do as they expected, so they turn to me for help. The latter two use Macs, which doesn't help.

Some computer helpdesks tend to assume a low level of familiarity with computers; when I was having trouble connecting to the Internet through my new cable modem I phoned and explained the steps I had just taken (rebooting, checking the plug connections, etc). I was told to "press the Start button, then Shut Down..." I asked if they wanted me to reboot and they said yes, having ignored all that I'd just told them.

As zmj says as well, doctors also tend to talk down to me.

quote:

As zmj says as well, doctors also tend to talk down to me.

Yeah, sometimes they can be a real pain in the sternocleidomastoideus.

quote:

Some people I know seem to have some sort of perverse pride in not knowing or caring how their computer works.

While I may not know how my computer works, I take absolutely no pride in that. I have gotten better, though. My computer doesn't have a wireless card, so when I am in a hotel, I have to use one of their bridges. Just last night I was on their 1-800 number trying to get it to work, and the man had me going into all these areas and typing things like cmd/config, etc., and I did it! We didn't get it to work, though he thought the problem was their very old bridges. BTW, he wasn't from India. I had heard most of those helpdesk people are actually in India, but he was local.

As for doctors, I often hear the opposite. The MD will come in and go on and on in medicalese, and then leave. I will then explain what he said to the patient.

At a conference I heard a terrible story the other day. A lady had an amputated leg and had an infection in her other foot. The patient in the bed next to her heard the doctor come and say, "We have to take the other one off," and then he left the room. Too bad for the doctor that the roommate was the dean of a very prestigious law school!

I have been visiting someone in hospital for the last six weeks and I have to say that the staff there, from the nursing auxillaries to the ward sister and physiotherapist, have made things very clear.

My wife used to be a nurse and was able to converse with them in jargon but, with me, they all used lay expressions.

Indeed, if I think back to my occasional encounters throughout my life with medical professionals, I have never had an instance of their trying to bamboozle me with jargon.

When I was referred to Moorfields with an ulcerated cornea (as spinoff from shingles) I was seen by no fewer than four different doctors, all of whom wanted to take a look at what was, I assume, a rareish condition. But they all explained very clearly what was going on and one of them even drew a picture for me of the ulceration as it appeared through the opthalmic microscope.

My own strategy, when faced with jargon that I don't understand from any expert, is to say, for example, "I'm sorry - I don't understand what you mean by 'config.sys'. Could you please tell me what you mean." I feel no shame in not knowing something.

from the better late than ever dept...

Fud: a short tail (of a rabbit or hare)

My grandmother loved Robert Burns, but I find him so hard.