Lost in Translation: Trying to speak blogosphere

March 4, 2004 By

I am still trying to learn the ropes in this blogosphere stuff. So I am wondering how to translate comments left by “michigancatholic” about our post on press coverage of the new reports on sexual abuse among Catholic clergy.

So is the following garble or a cryptic comment in an unknown tongue — blogese — and I simply have not been given the gift of translation? Here is the remark:

CATHOLIC.SYS corrupted; Overwrite exception cathkernel.sys at V2.bat; general fault at V2.exe
Reboot (Y/N)?
Posted by: michigancatholic at March 1, 2004 12:09 AM

General fault at V2 or is that VII? Is that case sensitive?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Web/Tech
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • noname

    Sounds like a Catholic programmer or software engineer trying to make sense of what has happened. He/she/it may be wondering whether it would be beneficial or even necessary to reboot the entire church system.

  • http://philalethia.blogspot.com Jonathan David

    It would seem to be a comment on the problems of the Catholic Church written in satirical fashion as a DOS error message. “Catholic.sys” would be the Roman Catholic Church. “Overwrite exception cathkernel.sys” probably means that critical information in the kernel code (the most fundamental code of a software program) was overwritten, causing the “software” to hang-up or go into error mode. “V2″ undoubtedly refers to Vatican II, so “V2.bat” would be the efforts that initiated the overwrite and “V2.exe” represents the whole of Vatican II, which created a “general fault” for the whole Catholic Church.

    Well, that’s my take. Pretty clever, if incredibly geeky!

  • http://www.brutallyhonest.org Rick

    As one computer geek (to apparently another), Jonathan David, I think you’ve nailed it.

  • http://weblog.theviewfromthecore.com ELC

    As an old code-slinger myself, I agree with Jonathan and Rick. And that comment is not blogosphere speak: it’s geek speak. :-)

  • http://bighominid.blogspot.com Kevin Kim

    The Paptrix Reloaded?

    Kevin