chrishowie.com

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.