Bonking the Mouse
Tech companies make up words and phrases all of the time. This was brought home to me early in my career at HP Labs.
Mice attached to computers and other devices were NEW! The manual writers in the US needed to describe the act of activating the mouse. On the internal news groups (forum) a genuine, and surprisingly popular, suggestion was to call it 'bonking' the mouse. Apparently 'hitting' the mouse seemed too violent.
Once we stopped laughing we did feed back the problem and 'clicking' was adopted.
Any other near misses out there?
Mice attached to computers and other devices were NEW! The manual writers in the US needed to describe the act of activating the mouse. On the internal news groups (forum) a genuine, and surprisingly popular, suggestion was to call it 'bonking' the mouse. Apparently 'hitting' the mouse seemed too violent.
Once we stopped laughing we did feed back the problem and 'clicking' was adopted.
Any other near misses out there?
