Re: Press button X!
Tutor: Press button X!
Student: [Reaches up and touches the screen]
Tutor: No, no, that won't work. It's not a touchscreen display. You need to press it with the mouse.
Student: [Lifts mouse up to the display]
Tutor: No, no. Good grief. OK, let's start again! Move the cursor over the button!
Student: [Reaches up to the screen, touches the blinking cursor in the command terminal, then tries to drag it over to the X button]
Tutor: Oh for the love of... Look, just move the mouse pointer over the X button by dragging the mouse across the mouse mat then briefly pressing down on the left mouse button!
Student: Oh you mean "click the button"? Why didn't you just say so?
Tutor: [Shoots himself in the head]
Sometimes you just have to accept that language evolves to reflect the way it is actually used by the majority. This is exactly why dictionaries are continually revised.
NB The above scenario is a real example drawn from my personal experience (although I didn't actually shoot myself). The "student" in question was actually my elderly mother, who I was coaching over the phone, desperately trying to retrieve somebody's contact information from my PC. This was many years before smartphones and cloudy storage.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
