I reluctantly accept FUNCTIONALITY.

Larry Hendrick certainly wasn't the first to write about it, but he articulated what I thought about the language of technology; that it often takes a good word rich with meaning and destroy it with the three little letters, i t y.

FUNCTION is one of those words and as long as I've been a friend of that word, I've known a couple of extensions to that word such as functional or functions. But when I first heard the word functionality, I stopped breathing for a few minutes while my mind tried to reconcile the term.

What does functionality mean?

Looking at other ity words such as personality, brutality, generosity and respectability, I tried to determine how that prefix modifies the word. In the case of personality, the ity denotes the characteristic of being a person. In the case of brutality, the characteristic of being a brute or the act of being brutal. With generosity, its the characteristic or the act of being generous. And so on.

Functionality therefore must mean the characteristic of being functional.

Therein lies my problem. The word functional already describes a characteristic, that of having a function, or being able to function. A functional car is one that works. It can operate. What is the functionality of a car?

Quite often when you hear the term functionality spoken by people in the technology industry, they're mostly referring to a feature. For example, the ability of the software to save a document to the file system. This is a feature. When it works, its functional. When it doesn't its defective. But you will often hear the words the save functionality's not working. Larry Hendrick gave another software example, that of the search functionality. This is actually the search feature, or the search function. It's functional or defective.

We often refer to defective software.

I must admit, my command of the English language isn't native even though I've been speaking it all my life and there are time when I have to say things in my head three or four times before I think that they sound right, but this is one of those times when I can't get around the word. It feels wrong. Exaggerated, as thought its trying to sound more important than it really is. Reminds me of a skit by George Carlin where he's making fun of the prefix "pre." I can see the point of adding pre- to some words, but George was talking about its overuse. It's used way too much and for the most part, used to add a level of importance to the subject.

But my war with functionality is over. I won't stress over it any longer. I just won't use it, and nobody can make me use it. I'll sit quietly in meetings while that word is being bantered around and when it's my turn to speak, I'll use the words that I'm comfortable with.

This article forms the last time I write that dastardly word!

Some people just need a slap on the back of the head

There used to be a saying; there's one born every minute. On this planet of seven billion, and counting, it's probably insane to think that the reality of what that number really means now. Even taking mortality into consideration, assuming that the one born every minute isn't dying at the same rate as the others, then the situation on the planet is getting exponentially worse.

In 2012, the World Population Reference Bureau estimated that there were 267 people born every minute. There were 107 deaths in that same minute. Do the math. This means an additional 160 people to our already overloaded planet. That saying, or proverb, or phrase hasn't been updated in a long time. It's probably farer to say that there are at least twenty born every minute. One just seems so low.

So let's go with twenty.

Twenty idiots have been born in the minute that it took you to read to this point. Darwin would have told us not to worry. Natural selection will ensure that they depart from the planet on the next bus which is coming right along. It has space for 107 people and there are 20 spots reserved for the idiots. But that's not going to happen. Our wonderful medical system and all the safety measures we've put in place will make sure that not all twenty go away. So let's make it fair and say that six (one third, give or take) will meet their demise. This seems fair. So fourteen will be added to our overcrowded planet.

And that's every minute.

Seven billion people on the planet. We can guess all day about how many idiots there are currently. But it's more than a million, and I can guess it's really, really close to a billion. Really close. I know this because in the short space of thirty years, I've seen so many changes in how we behave. And this isn't because I'm getting older. This is real. We're less patient. We're more demanding. Less tolerant. More selfish, inward looking. We kill easily, much less moral.

In the old days you could walk around for days, even weeks, without running into an idiot. Some people lived a lifetime without a single encounter with an idiot. That's highly, highly unlikely these days. The chance of running into an idiot within fifteen minutes of leaving your home is extremely high. Even if you stay indoors, the chances of running into an idiot aren't reduced to zero. You're likely to get a phone call from one, or even see one on television. Worse still, you might even get a knock on the door from one.

There's also a fairly good chance that you live with one.

And if you do, your options are very limited.

There are only two options to you if you have an encounter with an idiot. Ignore them, or confront them. The first option, ignoring them, takes some effort. In the first case you need to recognise them first. Sometimes they hide and they're not so easy to spot, but you can detect them if you're patient and listen. Confrontation is the option selected by most people, and that's only because they're not aware of what they're dealing with until its too late. At that point your'e deep in the middle of an argument you can't possibly get out of, you look at your combatant and it dawns on you that you're dealing with an idiot and you can't untangle yourself from that mess. You feel a sense of duty to walk away with your dignity. Stopping now seems too much like giving up, admitting that you're wrong. You have to stay in there, no matter how silly it looks like. You feel as though you just can't let them win. But in reality, the idiot has already won. They sliced the ball just over the net, you ran like an idiot to hit it back at which point the ball was lobbed over your head bouncing safely inside the court. You lost that point. The savvy idiot will make you run to the net time and time again. Your desire to win points will make you rush to the net.

And even if you don't confront them physically, whether it's by shouting back because they said something, or getting irate, you may confront them mentally. That's even worse because you engage in this internal turmoil of which the idiot isn't a participant. That makes you even more irate and you therefore head into this downward spiral. Even if you're smart enough to engage in sophisticated rationale where you convince your brain that you're the better person, something deep inside you knows that you've ultimately lost. Like the idiot who cuts into the line in front of you, glares at you and you do nothing. Even if you rationalise that it's safer, more intelligent and civilised to say nothing, that heated feeling at the back of your head that rises and moves around to your temples won't go away. To ignore the idiot you really need a change of character. This isn't about convincing yourself that the idiot doesn't exist, it's actually knowing they don't. It's rising to that eleventh plain of awareness where truly as you can't see the air, the idiot also doesn't exist.

But still, some people need a slap on the back of the head. Not because they're idiots, but you have a duty formed from a deep sense of compassion for your fellow man and woman to make sure that they know you care. You slap them not because you're offended by the idiotic act, but to make them realise that you care.

Really, that's why.