January 2012

Monthly Archive

Things I’ve been thinking about.

11 Jan 2012 | : blog

I’ve been trying to learn the French language.                                                                    What a strange language. The words and what they stand for are so strange, unlike any other language I’ve ever looked at.                                                         What’s a foreigner to do?

English makes sense but with our modern way of saying things, a non-English speaker would be lost for sure.                                                                                                What I mean is with all the contractions and abbreviations, what’s a foreigner to do?

Examples: “asap” for “as soon as possible”, TV for television, frig for refrigerator, etc.

But these are easy, we use letters for States(ex. CA, NY, Al, KS, HI, etc.), towns (LA for Los Angeles, NY for New York, PG for Pleasant Grove, CG for Cottage Grove, Vegas for Las Vegas, etc.)                                                                                             But we use them for things too.                                                                                           SGPD or St. George Police Department, etc.

One thing I want to bring up is a building material. OSB. What in the world is that?

One day I was working for someone and needed another piece of sheeting material for the roof repairs I was doing. The man I was working for wanted me to just go to the Home Depot store just down the street instead of driving across town to Lowe’s so his charge account could be used.

He wanted me to call and get a price first. He might just send the money with me. So I called the store and asked for the building supplies and asked the clerk if he had a certain size of wafer board(made out of chips or wood wafers and glued into sheets), or pressed board(saw dust glued and pressed into boards).

“No, we don’t carry anything like that”. he told me.

“Give me the manager.” I got the same answer.

Finally they connected me with man in his 60s. “Sure we have that but these kids just know it as OSB. Even the managers because they 28 years old or younger.”

This upset me but I went and bought the board there in spite of it.  “What’s wrong with people don’t they know what something is?”

So what is OSB? possibly a brand name but I’m sure it must stand for “Out Side Board.”   Has to be something dumb like that.   Yes “Oriented strand board”. Knew it had to be something like that.

Why do we do this?

“Skill saw” for circular saw? “Crescent wrench” for “open end adjustable wrench”?

It makes it shorter and easier to say but for someone from another language, it can be very confusing.  And it can be for the locals too.

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