The phrase “stand up an instance” crossed my awareness the other day. Here’s an example usage “I could really use some guidance / hand-holding to figure out how to stand up an instance of SureStep Online on top of a SharePoint repository.”
Phrase like this are markers. They tell us what group a person is a member of. Or, trying to be. Or, where he’s coming from. This article at Slate had sensitized me to that.
The Slate author talks about fingerprint words. We all tend to pick unusual words and turns of phrase. They spread like fads thru our networks. Micro information cascades.
“…I went home after work and asked my wife if there were any weird, fingerprint-type words I used often.
“You mean like iteration?” she said, without the slightest pause. Then the floodgates opened. “You also say tangential all the time. Oh, antiquated, too! And you’re always talking about the extent to which someone did this or that.”
“Stand up an instance?” Where did that one come from? We have stand up desks, stand up comedians, stand up guys, standing up for someone/something, stand up to the boss, and the list goes on.
It took me a surprisingly long time to track down what metaphor “stand up an instance” is referencing. I wasted some time thinking it might be a sports term. Cricket maybe?
It’s from military. Here a example picked at random from Google books: “Needless to say, the 9th Engineer Battalion was ordered to stand-down on 19 July, 1970 for preparation to redeploy to Camp Pendleton as part of President Nixon’s Phase IV redeployment schedule.” Examples of stand up are harder to find since military writing is full of standing up against various opponents, or in trenches. But here’s one: “With a staff of fewer than fifty personnel in late 2003, CMATT had to stand up the Iraqi armed forces with completely inadequate resources.”
I find myself thinking this is part of the swing back toward the data center( see this 2005). Big planning is back, I guess.
And now for our regularly scheduled clickbait:
- Good essay about cloud service security, using Apple as a counter example.
- Unbelievable good essay about how sometimes there appears on the boundary of the evolutionary niche your living inside of a trap and it swallows your entire species.
- Somebody must have enjoyed making this collection of gifs suitable for many occasions, but I couldn’t find one for the reaction we all have to clickbait.
- Most hated industry.
There’s room for someone to get a masters or PhD in some field (anthropology? linguistics? comparative literature?) doing fingerprinting of people’s careers by the words and phrases they use. I don’t know if you can take a paragraph and identify an individual person from looking at it, but surely for a lot of Internet discourse you could predict whether someone was a member of some programming language sub-tribe simply by e.g. asking if they ever used “monad” in a sentence ever in their whole lives.
At my work we say “stand up” quite often. We mean “get some server up and running from scratch,” and usually since it’s an EC2 instance, “stand up an instance” is what we are talking about. I am not so confident that the origin of “stand up” is military. I wonder if contractors talk about standing up a house frame or something — the metaphor to me is of raising a 2×4 to a vertical position.