No time tonight for a long entry, but I just had to put in a link to a site that all of you word lovers out there should like: Double-Tongued Word Wrester, a very well-researched site on slang, jargon, and other odd bits of English. I'm particularly fascinated by many of the words from African or Indian varieties of English. I'd think that a study of them might be rewarding for a writer trying to come up with realistic futuristic slang words, for example. Neat site. (Found via Language Hat, which is also a really neat site for those who like language.)

A somewhat amusing incident at work today: We have an online system for people to log bug reports and feature requests for software. This includes requests related to the online help. I'm working on the online help for a product that's currently in alpha. There are a substantial number of new features in this release, and almost all the existing interface elements have been changed in some way, so it's a big job. I'm working through it slowly, and every couple of weeks I send the programmer a new compiled help file.

So, I log into the software change request database today, and somebody has logged a change request, which basically reads, "The online help needs to be updated to describe new features."

I resisted the temptation to fire back an e-mail reading, "Why, thank you, I never would have thought of that on my own."

There probably is a lesson here, though. Editing HTML is tricky, and to give myself some kind of organizational scheme, I'm working through the help topics in the order they appear in the Table of Contents. If I want to keep change requests to a minimum, though, I should probably edit the help for the features that users/testers use most first.

On the other hand, it's not clear to me that there's much value to be gained out of minimizing the number of change requests. It's just mildly annoying to be told that something is broken when I know that it's broken and I just haven't had a chance to fix it yet.

Never mind, it will all get done. Though I'm a bit frustrated by how slowly it's going - I'm a slower writer of online help than I am of print documentation. I'll get speedier as I get used to the workflow.