3 ms·
Since the author is foreign, he can perhaps be forgiven for confusing idioms, but not for being so pedantically wrong about it. Specifically, he claims that tr
by fijiaarone 4y ago
Since the author is foreign, he can perhaps be forgiven for confusing idioms, but not for being so pedantically wrong about it.
Specifically, he claims that true yak shaving is not really yak shaving, but “rabbit holing”.
The term “going down the rabbit hole” comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, where she follows a white rabbit on a nonsensical series of adventures as she gets distracted from her school work.
The term “yak shaving” comes from the Ren & Stimpy Show, a nonsensical Canadian cartoon, and is about all the interdependent tasks that need to be done in order to accomplish your seemingly simple goal, and thus revealing why it is that the yak (a creature with notoriously long, tangled, dirty fur) never gets shaved and a cautionary tale about why it must not be neglected.
- jameshart 4y agoI think post-Matrix, Carrollian rabbit holes have an additional connotation of ‘seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes’ - ie that while the journey may be strange and full of distractions, truth might be found at the bottom. But as I said in my own response the cultural meanings of these terms are not universal.
- agumonkey 4y agoa bit like fully reading the F manual :)
- Flameeyes 4y agoLeaving the casual xenophobia aside, I never said anything about "real" yak shaving. Indeed, as others noted already, I clarified that everything I'm writing is from the point of view of my niche, which (as the title implies) is systems engineering. In the SRE/PE/DevOps meaning of the name, since that's also an adopted job title that has quite different semantics in other fields. I'm glad _someone_ keeps track of where bits and bobs of jargon come from, because they'll make great trivia in a future episode of QI, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not profoundly interested in the philology of our terms as much as I have an interest on providing a quotable reference to explain specific work.
- mbrodersen 4y ago> Since the author is foreign, he can perhaps be forgiven for confusing idioms I am impressed by your ability to appear both arrogant and a bit of a culture snob in one short sentence. Bravo!