Staggered strategy, botchered links :-) [LWN.net]

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:03 UTC (Thu) by nelljerram (guest, #12005)
In reply to: Staggered strategy, botchered links :-) by proski
Parent article: Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

It made sense to me. (I'm a native British English speaker.)

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 21:06 UTC (Thu) by cdarroch (subscriber, #26812) [Link]

Me too (en_CA), although "staggered approach" would have been more natural, I think. Staggered arrival times, for instance, are a technique to avoid traffic problems caused by large numbers of people arriving at some place (a school, an event, etc.) at the same time. (Sort of a real-world example of the thundering herd problem. :-)

I think what caught some people's attention here is not so much a problem with the root word "stagger" as it is that "staggering approach" is intended to mean "taking the approach of staggering certain events in time" but has the accidental connotation of "approaching while staggering around drunkenly". I'm not a grammarian, but I believe the difference is between a present participle ("staggering approach"), which has an amusingly active sense in this case, and a past participle ("staggered approach"). (See the Wikipedia entry on participles.)

Apropos of word use, "botchered" strikes me as a funny neologism of "butchered" and "botched", either of which would have had roughly the same meaning, I think.