RE: A little respect for "unvalidated"

["Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com>]

In my line of work (medical devices), the meaning of "unvalidated" is
crystal clear. If that's true only for one industry, then let's call it
jargon and I'll stop hockin' the dictionaries' chainik.

On the other hand, if its meaning is clear over a broad range of
technical fields (your NIST example below) then it's an omission.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: McLauchlan, Kevin
> Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 2:58 PM
> To: Dan Goldstein; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: RE: A little respect for "unvalidated"
> 
> In our capacity as a rowdy and fractious gang of technical 
> ... er... communicators, what do we recognize as the limits 
> on our English use of prefixes and suffixes, given a base 
> word that we wish to modify?  
> 
> Do some members of this list regard the list of examples 
> attached to the dictionary entry for "un(-)" to be a complete 
> and exclusive list? Which dictionary is authoritative, 
> then, and why?
> 
> FWIW, I have a far more liberal interpretation than that 
> (regarding the list as examples not as a complete and 
> non-extensible prescription), but I'm prepared to be shown to 
> be wrong.
> 
> If y'all were talking about, say Hardware Security Modules, 
> and you wanted to talk about the ones that had been validated 
> by NIST as being compliant with the FIPS 140-2 standard, and 
> the HSMs that had NOT been so validated, how would you refer 
> to the have-not-been-validated bunch? "Unvalidated"? 
> "Non-validated"? Other?  Why?
> 
> It's DEFINITELY not "INvalidated", which has its own specific 
> meaning, as Dan rightly observes. 
> 

This message contains confidential information intended only for the use of the addressee(s). If you are not the addressee, or the person responsible for delivering it to the addressee, you are hereby notified that reading, disseminating, distributing, copying, electronic storing or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this message is strictly prohibited.  If you have received this message by mistake, please notify us, by replying to the sender, and delete the original message immediately thereafter.  Thank you.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat