“Erroring off?”

by Chris on Jul.23, 2008, under Computer

Has anyone told you that a program is “erroring off” or that some system “errored off?” Occasionally I have the pleasure of receiving such notices and every time it makes me cringe.

Let me explain something. “Error” is not a verb. You can’t error. It’s not possible. When you type “erroring” it has a red wavy underline for a reason.

You can err. “Erring off” is at least valid English, but I’m not sure what purpose the “off” serves. “Erring” works by itself.

Or you could just use one of the industry-standard terms, like

crashed,
failed,
went down, or
is unavailable.

As a bonus, most of these actually convey the nature of the problem. The only information “erroring off” conveys is that you not only don’t know exactly what went wrong, but also have a substandard grasp of the English language.

6 Comments for this entry

Jay
July 23rd, 2008 on 10:05 am
If it’s a program error, I tend to prefer the phrase: “threw an error”. There’s a slight connotation in that which is: it’s the program that is causing the error, not some random transient thing we can’t understand. It implies a specific error and a specific place in the code to investigate.

Also, if it’s a server, I prefer “went down” over crashed. I like to reserve crash for an actual physical hard drive crash. I think too many people equate “computer not doing what I want” to “computer crashed.” I think there’s a real opportunity to lead by example there.
Chris
July 23rd, 2008 on 10:19 am
As an analogy to a plane crash, I have no problem using “crash” to describe a program exception (particularly a segfault). IMO, services go down, programs crash, and hardware fails. Really, really bad hardware failures can also be crashes, such as hard drive failures as you say.
Michael
July 23rd, 2008 on 11:32 pm
“Verbing weirds language”
– Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
Chris
July 24th, 2008 on 8:27 am
The very same strip I was thinking of when I wrote this.
intro
July 27th, 2008 on 5:00 am
my life erroring off with vista AHHH!!!
cathy
August 7th, 2008 on 9:04 am
Even geeks need grammar police. Thanks for your vigilante-ism…. is that a word?!?