Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Computer programmers are maligned both publicly (as nerds in society)
    and privately (as nerds in Digital).
    
    Used car dealers are a rank above politicians.
    
    Then there are agents of top secret organizations who are paid by a
    country's taxpayers to deprive them of civil rights.  The word "spook"
    is unjustifiably kind.

    What no one tells you is that "spook" is a description of the
    personality type preferred by that Certain Internationally-oriented
    American organization.
    
    							Ann B.

    The sUBTLY cONCEALED aCRONYM in .2 reminds me what we called the same
    organization when I consulted to them in the '70s from Bolt Beranek &
    Newman Inc., but when a conditition of their funding was that we
    neverNeverNEVER could reveal whence the $$s sprang...  The Cigar
    Institute of America.  O'course, them were the days before second-hand
    smoke was an issue... :-)
    

    	Ah yes, back in the early 70s I worked on speech processing with
    someone who was an acknowleged world expert, but had an openly
    expressed political viewpoint that meant he could never become a
    government employee. Our main customer was a government laboratory
    whose name or location could never be mentioned, but was a subsidiary
    of GCHQ.
    
    	They would come to us with purely hypothetical questions, like
    "Imagine you had a tape recording of a conversation that sounded almost
    as if there was a shower going on in the background; how would you
    process it to make it more intelligible?"
    
    	We had a meeting at their site once, and you had to be escorted to
    the toilet by an employee since there were 3 different door combination
    locks between the meeting room and the toilet.
    
    	They had very efficient receptionists. I and my colleague had to
    sit together with the chief receptionist pointing a gun just slightly
    to one side of us, while his buddy sat way off to our left with his own
    gun. They put their guns away when a member of staff positively
    identified us.

    I guess our backgrounds are far more similar that I'd known! :-)  One
    of my most amusing recollections of my daze as a Consultant to
    SpookLand was the time, deep in the sub-sub-basement of the Cigar
    Institute, when I was beginning another gig, this one on de-noise-
    ifying a recording of someone speaking a Slavic language, whilst the
    listening device producing the recording was heavily masked by what
    sounded like a vacuum cleaner.  While the tape was being played, and I
    and my Contract Minotaurs (that was a typo but I'm standing by it!)
    were interrupted by the cleaning staff, just outside our laboratory,
    starting up what sounded like an identical vacuum cleaner...
    
    Only later did I speculate that the sound-track in question might have
    been recorded close to those premises, rather than beamed across the
    ocean from a more Slavic venue...  "Spy vs. Spy" might have been
    internecine rather than global... :-)
    
    Ah, war-stories...  I got a million...

    Back to the topic. I don't know for certain but I suspect (Nick Hill
    could confirm/refute) that one of the main reasons for the publication
    of the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was that the old one
    (vintage 1933, but with Addenda growing for 60-odd years) defined
    abbreviator as `vatican official who draws up the Pope's briefs'-
    so the profession wasn't exactly maligned, but its copy-book was
    blotted.
    
    b

    Brian
    
    I'd like to help, but I only have the recently published NSOED, not
    the 1933 edition.  And of course they don't cite examples like 
    'abbreviator' among their reasons for revising and republishing.
    
    Nick
    
    PS: whilst discussing this I'll repeat the confession about one of 
    my forenames which is Hollyer.
    
    Many years ago I discovered that a Hollyer is a brothel keeper or
    whoremonger. 

<    `vatican official who draws up the Pope's briefs'-

Not a profession I'd want to have...



















Can you imagine?!  Following the pope around and doing nothing all day but
pulling up his underwear?  

     Carol  ;-)

I'd have thought he's more of a boxer shorts kinda guy.

Does anyone know what a "whitesmith" is?  It's listed as the profession of one 
of my great-greats. (Which cuts out refrigerator makers :^} )

Chele

    Nothing directly in the NSOED, but I'd suggest that it was a smith
    would be involved in the making of white dyestuffs.
    
    As a deduction it seems a little stretched though.  I'd expect white to
    be made by milling rather than smithing.

    If you try the NSOED sv. `smith' Nick, I think you'll find a more
    general `making' sort of idea behind `smith' - hence `goldsmith',
    `silversmith' (both to do with metals) and indeed `wordsmith' -
    which may have been a joke (suggesting that writers actually do work,
    rather than stealing their pay checks).
    
    Here's an idea: a blacksmith dealt with base metals, and a whitesmith
    dealt with precious ones (so some whitesmiths specialized as
    goldsmiths and some as silversmiths). Perhaps I should take this reply
    to the Fictionary note.
    
    A less plausible idea would involve the temperatures worked at - but at
    that rate a blacksmith should be a redsmith.
    
    This is getting silly.
    
    b

   from _The Chambers Dictionary_:

   whitesmith - a worker in tinned or white iron; a tinsmith; a polisher
	        or finisher of metals

    .12
    
    Give me a break...
    
    I had to fetch the NSOED from another room separated from here by
    two flights of stairs, and find the white and smith entries, and start
    to compose an answer, all within the ACB time-out period.  I thought I
    did reasonably well under the circumstances.
    
    :-)
    
    Nick