fogus: Phrases Of Maximum Dickery

Aug 22, 2012

Phrases of maximum dickery, or PoMD for short, hashtag #pomd:¹

More?

I heard this term somewhere but I can’t remember where. Any pointers would be helpful. ↩
This one can take two forms, the first is the non-dickery form and one of maximum dickery: 1) a rhetorical question that sets up a canned answer and 2) the start of an answer to a earnest question. ↩
The Joy of Clojure uses this phrase twice. :-( ↩
Thanks to Steve Losh for the open source related PoMDs. ↩

Chas Emerick

Alas, Clojure Programming contains 4 “as you can see”s. Even worse, it has 12 “obviously”s in there too. Damn. ;-)

Aug 22nd, 2012
mrb

“As I’ve said…” “As we’ve previously discussed…”

Aug 22nd, 2012
Vesa Marttila

“There is no need to get angry…”

Aug 23rd, 2012
Eric P

Oh man… thank you for pointing these out. I’ve definitely been guilty of saying some of these.

Aug 23rd, 2012
jason

Related to patches welcomed is “Please do investigate”, aka PDI.

Aug 24th, 2012
Martin Ced

I disagree with “obviously”: when you’re quickly reading something you may sometimes miss something obvious. It really helps when the author uses an “obviously”: you can then see that you can, yourself, trivially deduce the following statement the author makes.

Moreover I’ve got a little issue with a single word being labelled as a “Phrase of Maximum Dickery”. There’s, obviously, a non-sense that slipped in there ; )

Oct 7th, 2012
tim

yeah. “obviously”. it’s evil. it’s just code for: i don’t get this myself or i can’t explain it or i am to lazy. if you’d like to understand, consider this: i dont care about you learning this, because i don’t know you. since you are reading this, you’ve already bought my book and i can’t squeeze anything more out of you, so there is really no reason why i should bother. now, please go f*ck yourself.

all in one just one word.

Nov 1st, 2012

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