Hiccupps

"Testing helmets the old fashion way" the tweet said. "It'd be better if that was a brick wall " one of my team said. "Yeah, that is  what the specs asked for" I said. And how we all laughed, for just a little too long, those sad chuckles of shared recognition. Image:  tweet

The other day Michael Bolton tweeted this "Art" is the activity of directing attention to things and providing affordances for interpretations. Which is why testing IS an art. I love this tweet not least because it itself affords so much opportunity for interpretation. I'm intrigued by its possibilities. I found myself picking at it, perhaps even  factoring it. A few thoughts ... "Art" is quoted. Are these  scare quotes ? Do they suggest some uncertainty, disagreement or ironic intent? Or are they merely an alternative to some stylistic markup such as bold font that you might see in a dictionary definition? "Is" is emphasised in the second sentence. On that verb, that kind of marker might signify a refutation of some other assertion. Could that be the case here? What else might it be contributing? Both "art" and "an art" are used. The former is frequently defined in terms of beauty whereas the latter is usually applied ...

More quotes from  The Complete Plain Words : George Saintsbury denounced the futility of trying to 'draw up rules and conventions for a language that is almost wholly exception and idiom'.  Jespersen preached that the grammar of a language must be deduced from a study of how good writers of it in fact write, not how grammarians say it ought to be written. Forget the debate about whether testing is art or science. I'm wondering: is testing a language ? Image: phpSyntaxTree