Hi, Philip Hands wrote: > Colin Tuckley <col...@debian.org> writes: > > > On 18/09/15 22:23, Joerg Jaspert wrote: > > > >> what the heck bikesheds are. > > > > What you seem to not be understanding, possibly because English is not > > your first language, is that anything associated with the term > > 'bikeshed' is very *negative*. > > > > They have strong derogatory connotations, so much so that I doubt any > > native English speaker will be interested in them. > > Utter nonsense ... or are you trying to claim that Steve, Wookey, Neil, > Paul and I are not native English speakers now? > > I dispute your claim that "bikesheds", as opposed to "bikeshedding", is > negative -- if it were, we'd store our velocipedes in the cycle lock-up.
Not *all* things described as "bike sheds" take on the derogatory connotation. For instance, as in your example, an actual shed used to store actual bikes is taking on a purely descriptive and non-pejorative meaning when called a "bike shed". Forgive me for making this very obvious point. However, there is no effective distinction between "bike shed" (n., v., or adj.) and "bikeshedding" when used metaphorically in the context of software development. In fact, the word "bikeshedding" does not even appear in the famous essay (http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html, and note the mirrors at http://bikeshed.org/ and http://shed.bike/ whose URLs also use the "-ing"'less form.) ...and, did anyone notice that the actual commands [0] abbreviate "bikeshed" to "bs" (why? is there a length limit?)? Which has a euphemistic meaning which is much more widely known than "bikeshed" and which is far more pejorative. [0] https://ftp-master.debian.org/users/joerg/README.commands -- Robert Edmonds edmo...@debian.org
