Okay, I laughed out loud but maybe you need a particular background to find this funny.
A Powerpoint presentation included in the company’s consent agreement with NHTSA unveiled Friday shows the nation’s largest automaker told engineers to avoid terms both absurd and mundane for fear of e-mails leaking to the media or regulators. …
“Kevorkianesque,” apparently a reference to Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who claimed to have helped more than 130 patients commit euthanasia, was one of the presentation’s “judgment words” to be avoided. Others included: “apocalyptic,” “Band-Aid,” “Challenger,” “Cobain,” “Corvair-like,” “death trap,” “decapitating,” “disemboweling,” “genocide,” “grenadelike,” “Hindenberg,” “impaling,” “rolling sacrophagus (tomb or coffin),” “spontaneous combustion,” “Titanic,” “widow-maker” or “words or phrases with biblical connotation.”
At least in the auto industry, most engineers hate writing technical documents – which is good to know if you happen to be a tech writer. Also, most of those who don’t hate it are dreadful writers. But some of those who don’t hate it and aren’t terrible writers can be fiendishly funny – and therefore must be strongly discouraged from actually doing it.
I’m told Dilbert is written by a former engineer, and have no trouble believing it. I met a lot of Dilberts.
This is not just a GM thing. Before I moved to California most of my experience was with Ford, which was extremely careful about wording in any publication likely to be seen outside its own walls. So careful, in fact, that their big problem wasn’t with documents written by engineers but with those written by lawyers. For example, in documents referring to the Supplemental Restraint System (air bags) tech writers were absolutely forbidden to use such words as “detonate” or “explosive.” Even though with the early systems, those words were accurate. One particular component which was essentially a small blasting cap was officially named an “initiator.”
Ford liked to write its way out of legal issues in those days. After one memorable lawsuit, the long-known firewall between the passenger and engine compartments became a “bulkhead.” It was never actually very good at stopping fires from spreading and nobody could imagine how it could be made to be so without adding hundreds of pounds to cars that were already too heavy. So in Ford did the lawyers a stately nomenclature-change decree.
In early Aerostar minivans, beancounters overrode the engineers and equipped the vehicles with A4LD transmissions which were never intended for what were essentially light trucks. A4LD originally stood for Automatic 4-Speed Light Duty and they worked fine in little front-wheel-drive coupes, but when the Aerostar transmission failure rate started looking like it would at least approach 100% word came down from on high that the transmission’s name was now officially Automatic 4-Speed Lockup Device. Naturally this solved the (lawyers’) problem overnight.
There was a bunch of stuff like that and I’ve long since forgotten most of it, but the linked article was a fun trip down memory lane.
