My fave tech-talk site, NetLingo, is back once again with another classic term:
gremlins
The mysterious characters that sometimes appear on your computer screen, often in text documents and sometimes in code or e-mail messages.
For instance, if you copy the contents of a file from one program to another by highlighting the text with your cursor and then cutting-and-pasting, strange boxes or symbols may appear in the white space. At that point, you have to figure out another way to transfer the information or you have to go through and delete the bad characters, all the while muttering, “Darn gremlins.”
I remember back to the bad old days of Mobile devices, when their limited character-set support often meant you could get a random set of gibberish-speak on screen! Working for a handset vendor at the time, we spent hours trying to work round poor support on certain devices and between services.
Fast forward five years and now it seems that an increasing amount of spam email doesn’t even consist of intelligible characters – quite apart from what they are suggesting I do with myself (!), many emails just don’t make any sense.
Combine the two trends and you have the scourge of my life currently – spam email on my mobile. Well at least I know who to blame now – the gremlins in my machines!
[Via: NetLingo]