Am I the only person who's mildly bugged about having to say "captcha" instead of "capture" when referring to those little jumbled letters we have to type before we can do just about anything online?Wiki tells me that it's an anagram for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", but that doesn't justify it for me. In this case it should be CAPTTCHA. Why not "STUDS" ("Spam and Troll Ultimate Deterrent System") or "BITE" ("Back Into The Ether")?
I'm not under 25, I'm not from the hood and I love and protect the English language. Why did they decide to give these little buggers an urban dialect rather than an actual name? WHO decided this? When I'm forced to say it I feel stupid, like one of those middle-aged weekend Mods in the 60s who tossed around words like "groovy" and "outtasite" thinking that it fooled us into thinking they were cool.
I'm not cool, okay? So I'm not going to say "captcha". I don't say, "The Untouchables was about gangstas", or "Please pass the pepa." Forget it. You can't make me.
It never occurred to me that "captcha" was an urban way of saying "capture." I guess that could be partly because I pronounce the ending a as "ah" and not "uh."
ReplyDeleteYou could use "visual verification" instead, though, and most people would understand what you were talking about.
Don't fight it. Just go with it.
ReplyDeleteI know the feeling.I feel like I need to go back to school and learn all over again.All those years wasted on learning "proper grammar".
ReplyDelete