Friday, 27 May 2016
10:56 AM
Friday. Friday before a (US) holiday weekend. The only thing better than that is that it's Friday Words day.
This week one of my friends introduced me to bus factor. I've understood the concept, but didn't know we had a word. Bus factor is used in business (especially software, I guess) as a measure of how well information is dispersed on a team. To put it another way, it's a measure of how much it would impact a project if a given person on the team were to be hit by a bus. (Impact the project, get it? You're welcome.) If the bus factor is high, the impact is yuge; low bus factor, low impact.
 The term has been around for a while, since at least the 90s. It's also been expressed as a truck factor and with the somewhat less violent lottery factor. As in, if the individual were to win the lottery and decide not to continue working on your project.
Note to self: strive to achieve a non-zero bus factor.
For etymology today, the word kibosh, which is used overwhelmingly in the expression put the kibosh on. This came up in conversation this week—specifically, in an instant-messaging conversation, so the first question was how to spell it. That having been established, it was wondered whence came this word.
All sources agree: origin unknown. The word appeared in written sources in the 1830s (as "kye-bosh" in Dickens), recording the speech of lower-class Londoners. On the World Wide Words site, Michael Quinion has, as usual, a thorough exploration of possible sources for the word. Among proposed origins are Yiddish, Hebrew, Gaelic, Turkish, and Arabic. It might have originally referred to a short whip or possibly a tool used by clogmakers to smooth leather. But no one will commit to a definitive etymology as yet.
Bonus etymological mystery: the Dictionary.com blog recently addressed itself to the question of where bee comes from in spelling bee.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[categories]
Friday words, language
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