Who taught: James and Mike

Raining cats and dogs

It is raining cats and dogs now. It is a pretty scary storm with thunder and lightning. Hope everybody is safe!

Near my desk, my company’s UX (User Experience) team members nest together to do team coding work to meet the deadline of the new version release of the software. There is also a big white board that they use for keeping track of all of the work items. Today, I noticed a piece of paper stuck to the other side of the board. It reads, “Everyone here is a certified genius.” But, for some reason, someone covered two words of the sentence so that it became, “Everyone here is certified.” I bet Jake did it. Jake, it’s you, right? Well, by looking at it, I was curious. “Why someone covered the words here?” I asked to James. He said, “It might be something related to the word, ‘certifiable’.” “What’s up with ‘certifiable’?” I asked again. He told me that if someone is certifiable, it means he/she is insane. “So, when I see this sentence here, it sounds to me, ‘Everyone here is insane’,” James said.

The origin of the expression is from “certifiably insane.” And, at some point, people decided to drop ‘insane’ and make it shorter. People should not do this. It makes non-native English speakers harder to understand. Seriously, let’s not do that, shall we?

So, next time if you see someone is really out of his/her mind or mentally ill or just crazy, try to say, “Dude! You are certifiable.” Now, I am not sure whether this is very serious or it has a feeling of pulling someone’s leg. My friends! Should I be careful using this one?