Silly word games

[andrewducker]

Over on Twitter, Ben Werdmuller (@BenWerd) put out the call for development terminology that would make a paperback good thriller title, offering up "Fail Deadly" and "Locked Row".

I added my own "Fatal Exception", "Illegal Argument", and "Deadly Embrace".

Anyone got suggestions?

Comments

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

I once saw a button called "Execute Population"...

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deadlock-Sean-Black/dp/0593063392/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284541888&sr=8-1

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

A gripping tale of a narc squad taking down a heroin kingpin:

DEPENDENCY INJECTION

[ami-bender.livejournal.com]

Death by Null? The blue screen of death? The deadlock? The infinite loop of doom?

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

She! Was a PI with a crippling coke habit. Somehow she's got to catch her brothers killer and beat her addiction, otherwise she will always be...

RUBY ON RAILS

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Paamayim Nekudotayim.

*runs*

[andrewducker]

Sounds better in Hebrew - I'm not sure I'd buy a book called "The Double Colon"...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Illegal Operation

[simont]

In the spirit of Leon's use of the word "cleaner", you could probably cook up some cover art (involving a gunsight or a knife or some such) that would lend a suitably sinister air to The Garbage Collector.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Rachel didn't believe me when I told her garbage collector was standard terminology :)

[simont]

A novel about the assassination of a high military figure despite his elite team of bodyguards: General Protection Failure.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

That's fantastic!

[simont]

*bows* :-)

Come to think of it, one could almost argue that that's a valid alternative title for The Day of the Jackal.

[simont]

One surely ought to be able to concoct a decent spy thriller revolving around a mysteriously missing collection of top secret documents: File Not Found.

A gritty military drama about a bungled campaign and the soldiers' need to make tough decisions about whether to continue obeying orders: Bad Command.

[darkoshi]

::snickers::

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The Bad Sector
The Multiple Inheritance
Chipkill
The Interrupt Storm
The User Trap
The Edge Trigger

[/Ludlum]

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Critical section
Memory leak
The memory trampler
Race condition
Segmentation fault

[simont]

Race Condition must surely be a Dick Francis novel.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

The name of the button to view previous revisions always makes me smile: CHANGE HISTORY.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

A story of warring drug barons fighting for lucrative cannabis distribution terrirories: Hash Collision.

A government sends out a Super Secret Assassin to assassinate their own top spy: Echo Cancellation. (sorry, I guess that's a bit field-specific)

A rescue operation is mounted to find survivors of a severe earthquake on a previously-unknown fault-line underneath the Library of Congress: Page Fault.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

"Halting State" --

<http://www.amazon.co.uk/halting-state-charles-stross/dp/1841496650/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=utf8&qid=1284553067&sr=1-10>

[jccw.livejournal.com]

Kill Nine
Abort, Retry, Fail?

[zz]

CHAR, and it's sequel FLOAT, for fire and water based threats. :>

[zz]

Hungarian Notation - something cold war
Normalisation, or {whichever} Normal Form - something Equilibrium-y

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Yours sound too much like programmer speak, which might be okay if there was a computer related aspect to the story.

Can't you just do a computer program, maybe using a Markov model, to generate these?

[andrewducker]

"Deadly Embrace" and "Illegal Argument" are both fine for non-techies. The second one, for instance, is clearly an early John Grisham novel :->

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

"Regular Expression"
"Finite state automaton"

[andrewducker]

That last one is clearly a future Charlie Stross novel :->

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

DEADBEEF

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

"Null pointer" - could be like the empty signifier in North by Northwest, whether Roger 'O' Thornhill or the non-existent agent George Kaplan.

[darkoshi]

It's not quite correct, but "Blue Scream of Death" sounds like a good title to me.