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July 18th, 2008 | Posted in Technical Writing 9 Comments »
In the on-screen text in WordPress, on the Write > Page screen, I ran across the following help text.
When you can use the word Janky in your documentation?
Just yesterday my colleague Ben was asking how I felt about the use of contractions in help. Contractions? We’ve moved far beyond contractions. We’re now using terms like janky.
How I would love to publicly insult the applications I document! E.g., Hey, we know this feature is kludgey, but we couldn’t find an easy fix. Hang on — the next release will get better.
Honey! You’ve been reading urbandictionary.com again! Love it — “The fact that our microwave is now completely janky is due to my wife’s regrettably klugey temperament.”
Probably the hardest part of using spoken vernacular like this is … does your audience know what the word means?
Could be that I don’t know janky because I’m not American (is it a cultural/regional term?), and sure I can make a guess at its meaning, but if I happened to come across this in technical doco, I’d be a bit stumped. Klugey would also make me pause for a few moments. I’ve been working with Americans for 9 or so years now, and my husband lived in California for 4 years, so I’ve *heard* klugey, but for some reason, that’s not how I would think you would spell it. Not sure how it should be spelt, but it seems … odd …
Kirsty
Kirstys last blog post..STC Technical Communication Summit: Opening Panel
Hmmm. It’s sounds like my last name, which is German, so maybe the term got its start in Germany. Some people spell it Jahnke, and either pronounce it as a “Y” or a hard “J,” like I do. Excuse me, but I have to go now as I am feeling a little “Janky” because I haven’t had my morning coffee.
I have no idea what “janky” or “klugey” mean, but I get it from the context clues – “it’ll be better in future releases.” OK, so those words are synonymous with “wonky” (one of my favorites). I say throw in the vernacular, but support it with context. Makes for good fun, which we all need when we’re reading help documentation.
Firefox’s built-in dictionary acts up when I spell klugey without a d in it. Sad to say that even imaginary words have a correct spelling: kludgey. I recently edited a document that described how to address a piece of equipment so that it performed “glitchlessly”. Glitch, glitchy, glitchless are all engineering terms, I’m sure! Ha ha!
Tony Chungs last blog post..Self exposed when the lights go out
I added a “d” in kludgey just now — thanks. Tony, I like the term glitchlessly too. I think I’ll try to work that into my documentation in some subtle way.
I’ve never heard the word “janky” before either. It must be a trendy California word right now.
The whole ploy seems like a rhetorical move to me — admitting that something is poorly designed, but winning over the user by breaking the stuffy rules of software language with a cool urban term.
Isn’t anyone going to complain that they also included a comma splice? This is just another reason to ignore them and their janky, pretentiously hip vocabulary. (By the way, I’m American, and I’ve never heard “janky” until now.)
@Juliet, Oh yeah, the comma splice. Forgot about that one, but they’re so common, it’s hardly worth calling attention to.
Thank you for sharing…