A Sample Entry, Explained

A Sample Entry, Explained

  Here's a sample entry with explanation:

   

Sample Image …

Sample

v. To pick from a group: “Would you like to sample some of this?” —n. 1. What was picked. 2. A trial or taste—usually small, often free: “Care for a sample?”

NOTE: We say “sample” casually, but statisticians know it's important to follow special rules to avoid introducing BIAS and to truly characterize the larger POPULATION being Sampled.

Explanation: In this example, the bolded term (Sample) is what's being defined. As you can see, it is both a verb (v.) and a noun (n.). Both uses are demonstrated in quoted phrases (“...”). Plus, the noun form has two slightly different meanings (1. ... , 2. ...).

As above, offset notes (NOTE: ) may hold related information or in some cases additional comments. I've done my best to always make it clear whenever I'm expressing a personal opinion.

Any words of phrases you see set in small caps (e.g., BIAS, POPULATION) are defined elsewhere in the glossary. Ideally, these CROSS-REFERENCES would all be active hyperlinks. However, for the time being, you can easily use the letter TABS atop every GLOSSARY page and the ENTRIES menus on their left-hand sides to quickly and easily find any term you want.

PHOTOGRAPHS and illustration thumbnails have a small magnifier icon in their lower right corners. Click on them to see larger versions. A caption ending with an ellipsis (…) indicates there are additional comments associated with the enlarged view. When you're done viewing any such graphics, simply use your browser's BACK navigation feature to leave the GALLERY and return to the GLOSSARY.

Some real entries, like MAKE A BALE, include my personal How-To instructions, which are simple and easy to follow, but can be quite lengthy to describe. Help or nuisance? ...You decide.

In addition, at the bottom of every genuine ENTRY, there are also COMMENT and KEYWORD fields (see below).

You can click COMMENTS at the bottom of an ENTRY to see and/or contribute comments related to that particular ENTRY. If you have more general comments, please use the COMMENTS TAB (") instead. You'll find it atop every page.

Clicking on a KEYWORD brings up one or more ENTRIES the AUTHOR has decided might be useful to access together, as a group. In essence, you may think of them as pre-defined SEARCHES. Just remember that, like SEARCHES, the scope of the KEYWORD lookup is limited to the TAB you're currently on.

Vertical change bars along the left side of ENTRIES indicate they're either:

•  NEW
  - A single, solid, thick bar means ENTRY was not in previous edition, or
•  CHANGED
  - Hollow (thinner, double lines) bar means updated since last edition, or
•  UNCHANGED
  - No bar means no changes since the last major edition was released.

Thus, as you can see, this overall ENTRY has been revised, while the Sample ENTRY within it is marked as “new.”

“ALL” TAB (::)

“ALL” TAB (::)

n. A collection point intended to duplicate all regular GLOSSARY ENTRIES currently found in the non-alphabetic (“#”) and alphabetic (“A” - “Z”) TABS to the “ALL” TAB'S left (27 TABS, total).

The “ALL” TAB is not intended to duplicate the ENTRIES under the three other TABS to its right, namely the NEW (“+”), COMMENTS (“"”), or HELP (“?”) TABS. To individually search or keyword any one of those additional categories, first go to their respective pages, accessed via the usual navigation TABS, above.

NOTE: The “ALL” TAB'S purpose is to allow SEARCHING and KEYWORD lookup for the entire GLOSSARY from a single, convenient point. Otherwise you'd have to do so in each TAB, and combine the results manually.

So, why not just have the “ALL” TAB? Who needs all those others? Well, I liked the idea of thumbing through the GLOSSARY letter by letter, and since there is no Blogger facility for hierarchical KEYWORDS or limiting the scope on SEARCHES, I thought I had to do it this way.

(TechNote: To avoid any potential penalties for massive amounts of redundant text, <meta content='noindex,nofollow' name='robots'/> is used to prevent web crawlers from scanning the “ALL” TAB'S duplicate ENTRIES.)

That said, why do two colons (“::”) represent “ALL”? Well, following my own backwards logic, it's because I used “+” to represent “NEW.” In the negative spaces among the four colon dots I saw a plus shape. Thus, “ALL” standard ENTRIES “plus” all “NEW” ENTRIES would yield a solid square block, or in other words, completeness. A stretch? All I can say is, it seemed to make sense at the time.

Author

Author

n. The person responsible for the creation, collection, and/or reorganization of a body of printed work. —v. To produce such work.

NOTE: Mostly my authorship has involved taking a few hasty notes while on the job, and then spending hours upon hours of my personal, free time to turn those few scribbles into what you see here.

My basic Authoring process is:

1. Quickly gather STOCK CLERK-related words and concepts while on the job
2. Organize the collected terms and information
3. Compose appropriate definitions
4. Incorporate my own experience and things learned from others
5. Occasionally, as necessary, create new terms, definitions, etc.
6. Publish it all on the Internet
7. Print everything out, duplicate and then circulate hard-copies to gain additional input
8. Continue gathering info while revising and expanding new editions

Wherever I've invented new vocabulary, it was to describe something where the answer to the questions, “What's this?” or “What do you call this?” was either a literal or metaphorical shrug of the shoulders. SHARK-CUT is one such example. I couldn't find any other name for it, it's pretty descriptive, and so, there you go.

The submerged part of this Titanic-style iceberg is the aspect of Internet publishing. In case you didn't know, Blogger was not designed to host online GLOSSARIES. The architecture is all wrong.

Well, almost. I found just enough stuff that I could co-opt through my own personal stubbornness and truckloads of HTML and CSS brute force that I was able to get up what you see here. I imagine that, among others, the Blogger-dudes and -dude-ettes themselves are going to be somewhat pleasantly surprised. At least, I hope so.

Along the way, it's certainly been a lot of fun figuring out how to “MAKE IT GO!”

Comment

Comment

n. Written feedback from BLOG readers, who may respond with constructive criticism, or contribute additions, changes, or corrections, or offer personal stories about their own experience or opinions, or ask questions, make suggestions, and so on.

NOTE: Ordinarily, BLOGS are all about POSTS and Comments. The AUTHOR POSTS something as a BLOG ENTRY, and then—if the AUTHOR chooses to enable it—people have a chance to respond by making Comments.

Here, the same is also true. See the COMMENTS (") TAB for how to view and make your own Comments.

However, if you're looking for discussion, that's something a little different. Comments will typically deal with GLOSSARY-related issues only, and are kind of like “Post-Its®.” You know, you stick a little note up there, and folks read it, maybe, as they're passing by. But, by comparison, discussions are much different. Discussions are all about dialog. Give and take. Conversation.

Well, to converse, Comments are not the way to go, in large part because they (Comments) are moderated, and there's therefore a built in delay before they appear.

What you want for conversation is the Stockclerk Google group. Check it out by clicking on the link below:

Stockclerk

Visit this group

Entry

Entry

n. Synonymous with POST. That is, a single missive from the AUTHOR. Here in the GLOSSARY, each of these is generally dedicated to an individual TERM or phrase of interest pertaining to STOCK CLERKS.

Glossary

Glossary

n. A list of words relating to a specialized field or area of knowledge, often arranged alphabetically, and which may contain supplemental information, references, verbal and/or pictorial illustrations, and/or other notes.

NOTE: You'll often find a section in the back of a book labeled “Glossary” and defining various specialized terms used therein. But what about when there's no other front part of the book? Nowadays, there are many specialized dictionaries that somewhat blur the line between Glossary and dictionary, having titles like Dictionary of Mathematics, etc. Are they really just Glossaries on steroids?

A Glossary is generally acknowledged to be different from a dictionary, as dictionaries typically have much broader scopes, covering, for example the vocabulary of an entire language, and including background information about word origins, and so on.

So, if you care to ask, “Is this really a Glossary or a dictionary?” my answer is: “Is that really important?”

I'm choosing to call this a “Glossary,” and to my mind, that's that. If you want to argue about it, please don't bother me. Go to college. I hear that's what they do there.

How'd You DO This?

How'd You DO This?

  The short answer is, the hard way.

This is a Blogger-based website, but Blogger is not set up for anything like what you see here. So why choose Blogger? Well, because it was free, provided adequate resources, and it came with just enough flexibility to allow me to accomplish what I wanted to do.

The “secret,” here, if there is one, is that each TAB you see in the GLOSSARY is in fact a completely separate BLOG. What holds it all together is a lot of careful interlinking, and a common base of CSS—Cascading Style Sheets—to uniformly apply a shared look and feel across all the otherwise unrelated components. It's my headache, so I get to name it, and I call it “polyblogging.”

Even within each of these separate BLOGS, the LINKS and ENTRIES are by and large all managed entirely by hand. But, not because I like it that way. Because I had to. For instance, can you believe it? Blogger has no option to sort posts alphabetically. But, GLOSSARIES are all about alphabetically. So how do you do it? Again: the hard way. You figure out that you can go in and adjust the dates of each ENTRY (post) manually, so they sort the way you want them to. Sometimes that means also tweaking hourly timestamps to determine intra-day sorting, for example, if you have to insert a few new ENTRIES in a cluster.

Well, there's more. As if that weren't enough of a headache, Blogger has no in-line headlines option. So, if you want to save vertical space and look like all the real GLOSSARIES all do, then you have to turn off Blogger's headlines feature (again using CSS) and manage all your own headlines manually. And of course, headlines are LINKS, so you actually have to turn headlines back on whenever you add a new post, so you can find out where Blogger put it, copy the LINK, and then paste it into your hand-rolled headline and turn the Blogger headlines back off again. Fun, fun, fun.

And what about those convenient alphabetical directory lists of ENTRY titles? Yep: manually. Tallies of posts, photos, and so on? Manually. Alphabetical INDEX? Manually, all the way. ...And so on and so forth.

Cross-references? Be happy I took the trouble to at least attempt to set them all in SMALL CAPS (sic). But making them all LINKS? Fuggedaboudit.

So, with all the time and trouble it took (and you don't even know the half of it), you might wonder, why bother?

Ah, well,... That's another story!

Key

Key

n. See KEYWORD.

Keyword

Keyword

n. Keywords—sometimes also called “flags”, “labels”, “tags”, or simply “keys”—are a way to identify groups or collections of one or more GLOSSARY ENTRIES. Just click on a Keyword and you can instantly select, extract, and inspect the whole bunch.

The Keywords listed in italic fine print underneath each ENTRY tell you to which Keyword groups that particular ENTRY belongs. The slightly larger Keywords listing at the upper left side of each page tells you which Keywords are in use on that particular TAB, along with a number in parentheses that is the tally of how many ENTRIES on that page are in each Keyword group.

Note that Keyword usage is limited to the current TAB. For instance, if you click on one of the active Keywords you see in the upper portion of the left panel on this page, it will gather related ENTRIES from to this page only! Thus,...

IMPORTANT: To pull Keyword-linked ENTRIES from the entire GLOSSARY, you must first go to the “*” (“ALL ENTRIES”) TAB.

Which words are in which group headed by which Keyword is initially determined by the AUTHOR. However, Keywords may also be suggested by interested CONTRIBUTORS. The relationships among Keyword ENTRIES is arbitrary. This is A Very Good Thing, and differs from the results of using a simple search because it brings into play the intelligence of the person creating the KEYS. For an example, see the discussion on CUTS under the heading, “Topical Keywords,” below. To us, CUTS and BLADES are clearly related, even though a simple search would not put them together, since the entry for CUT does not mention BLADES, nor vice versa. It's only by the power inherent in defining arbitrary relationships using Keywords that they are so easily brought together. Viva KEYS!

NOTE: At one point in time (when there were 438 ENTRIES in all), these were all of the Keywords in effect across the entire GLOSSARY. They are shown here to demonstrate underlying organizing principles, even though it's certain details, such as the tallies of occurrences across all TABS, have long since changed. More about the table headings and curious looking entries, below.

(NB. Keywords listed in this table are not active.)

Regular-			Meta-Keywords
TOPICAL			STRUCTURAL			ALPHABETIC			SPECIAL
#	Keys		#	Keys		#	Keys		#	Keys
12	3RD PARTIES		13	~c:caution		5	~~?		1	~~~CONTACT INFO
32	ACRONYMS		42	~c:edits X		12	~~#		1	~~~DISCLAIMER
80	ACTIVITY		11	~c:graphic		7	~~A		1	~~~HELP
23	CARTS		1	~c:invitation		48	~~B		1	~~~LICENSE INFO
53	CASES		127	~c:note		48	~~C		1	~~~WHAT'S THIS?
13	CLEANING		5	~c:steps		23	~~D
20	CUTS		13	~c:story		9	~~E
63	DISPLAYS		6	~c:table		10	~~F
33	EQUIPMENT		16	~c:tm		18	~~G
38	EXPLANATIONS		109	~c:usage		9	~~H
31	HOW-TO		3	~c:warning		9	~~I
1	HUMOR		6	~c:weblink		4	~~J
21	MARKS		88	~d:multi		3	~~K
15	MATERIALS		324	~d:single		14	~~L
16	PA		23	~i:adj.		21	~~M
25	PAPERWORK		9	~i:adv.		14	~~N
37	PEOPLE		49	~i:multi		9	~~O
69	PLACES		365	~i:n.		39	~~P
6	PROCEDURES		3	~i:other		0	~~Q
12	REFERENCE		86	~i:v.		27	~~R
24	SECURITY		50	~r:changed		60	~~S
43	SIGNAGE		99	~r:new		19	~~T
85	THE SHELF		289	~r:unchanged		7	~~U
17	TOOLS		146	~r:update		4	~~V
2	—		46	~r:wip		15	~~W
						3	~~X
						1	~~Y
						0	~~Z
						438	~~ALL

Topical Keywords are those that relate to a particular subject, for instance CUTS. There are many kinds of CUTS (e.g., TOP-CUT, WINDOW-CUT, and X-CUT, to name just a few) as well as things (like BLADES, HOLSTERS, etc.) that relate to CUTS. The tally shown in the table is 20. Instead of hunting them down, you can just click on the CUTS keyword and they are presented to you. If you're on an alphabet TAB, you'll get all ENTRIES relating to CUTS that start with that particular letter. If you're on the Star “*” (i.e., “ALL ENTRIES”) TAB, you'll get all 20 of them (or whatever the current number happens to be).

Structural Keywords are meta-Keywords. That is, they provide an additional level of information about the GLOSSARY ENTRIES themselves. All meta-Keywords begin with one, two, or three tilde (“~”) characters to set them apart from regular, Topical Keywords.

The meta-Keywords' leading tilde character forces them all to be nicely separated in the sorting order. The following, second character further categorizes the KEYS, and the colon immediately following that visually offsets the name of the Keyword flag.

For instance, all Keywords beginning with “~c:” are Content flags, which tell you things you can “see” (the pun is to help you remember: “c” and “see”, get it?) by looking at the kind of content and structure the ENTRIES display.

Here's a complete list of Structural KEYS current at the time of this writing:

(NB. Keywords listed in this table are not active.)

CONTENT FLAGS
Key	Meaning
~c:caution	Contains an important CAUTION:
~c:edits X	Contains previous EDITS/version(s) (= ~r:changed)
~c:graphic	Contains GRAPHIC element(s)
~c:invitation	Contains INVITATION to contribute
~c:note	Contains at least one additional NOTE:
~c:steps	Contains instruction(s) or procedure STEPS
~c:op-ed	Contains OPINION and/or EDITORIAL comments
~c:story	Contains a true STORY
~c:table	Contains data in a TABLE
~c:tm	Contains TRADEMARK(S): i.e., ®, TM, or SM.
~c:usage	Contains “quoted examples of USAGE”
~c:warning	Contains a very important WARNING:
~c:weblink	Contains an external LINK to another website
DEFINITION FLAGS
Key	Meaning
~d:multi	Definition is MULTIPART
~d:single	Definition has only a SINGLE part
PARTS OF SPEECH
Key	Meaning
~i:adj.	Is an ADJECTIVE
~i:adv.	Is an ADVERB
~i:multi	Is MULTIPLE parts of speech
~i:n.	Is a NOUN
~i:other	Is something OTHER than a keyed noun, verb, etc.
~i:v.	Is a VERB
ENTRY STATUS FLAGS
Key	Meaning
~r:changed	CHANGED (= ~c:edits; i.e., has back version(s) X )
~r:new	NEW ENTRY
~r:unchanged	UNCHANGED from previous edition
~r:update	⋅UPDATES (= ~r:new, or (+) ~r:changed)
~r:wip	WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Alphabetic Keywords are the second category of meta-Keywords. Their main purpose is to provide a cross-check tally, or count, of the number of ENTRIES listed under each GLOSSARY TAB. See the first table, third column group for the tallies current at the time of this writing. Notice that for each TAB, the tally of all ENTRIES, e.g., ~~X = ~r:unchanged + ~r:update, providing a convenient cross-check on those particular status flags.

Special Keywords are the third category of meta-Keywords. Their sole purpose is to provide a kind of safety net for anyone that somehow manages to miss other opportunities to access the indicated information.

PLEASE REMEMBER: All of the examples shown here are just that—examples. For the actual lists of keys and tallies, be sure to consult the appropriate GLOSSARY TAB themselves. Its a near certainty that the “live” information will be more current than these static explanations.

Meta-Keyword

Meta-Keyword

n. KEYWORDS that are not about the GLOSSARY'S subject matter (i.e., STOCK CLERK vocabulary), but can rather about the GLOSSARY itself. Sometimes thought of as “stepping up a level” to deal with the surrounding context. See also KEYWORDS.

NOTE: As a practical example of the difference, compare...

• CUTS — a regular KEYWORD, that pulls together ENTRIES about a genuine STOCK CLERK concern—namely, the various kinds of cuts you can make, plus terms for related things like the tools used to make them.
  
  vs.


• ~c:note — a Meta-Keyword that brings up GLOSSARY ENTRIES with supplemental notes (like this one), plus how many such ENTRIES there are. Clearly this is not something a STOCK CLERK cares about (that is, unless he's making this GLOSSARY, heh heh.)

PDF

PDF

n. “Portable Document Format,” a cross-platform standard electronic document format established by Adobe Software Inc. that functions somewhat like “digital paper,” allowing electronic documents to be viewed and printed in a consistent, fixed format across various computers and printers using a free, downloadable application called Adobe® Reader®.

NOTE: The main idea of a PDF is that everyone sees the same thing. Web pages may vary in appearance from one computer to another, because the web is a dynamic format. Things can move around, and fonts may vary, etc. Just resize your window to see why dynamic text is good! ...most of the time.

But, when printing, you'd like a “printer friendly” version, where layout and fonts and everything else is assured to be as the AUTHOR intended. With a PDF, everything “stays put.”

So, the good news: PDF versions of these pages are available! (Yea!)

The bad news: Google (who owns Blogger, etc., where this web site is hosted) doesn't yet have open sharing of stored PDF documents. (Boo-oo.)

So be it.

I've got PDFs, and you can get them for free, but to do so you have to CONTACT me and send me a valid email address so I can enroll you as a registered viewer of my stored PDFs.

At least for the time being, that's just how it works.

(And by the way—Scout's honor, cross my heart, and all that—without your explicit permission, that's all I'll ever do with your email address: just enroll you and enable you to view and download (and thus print out) nicely formatted PDF versions of these pages.)

For more information about PDFs and Adobe® Reader®, see:
^{http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html}

Photograph

Photograph

n. An image recorded by a camera, and provided in the GLOSSARY as an illustration to help clarify or illuminate a definition.

NOTE: In the GLOSSARY, photographs (and other graphics such as charts and diagrams) are reduced to black-and-white thumbnails so pages load faster, and printouts look better. Yet, all are “rollover” images, meaning that when you place your cursor over them, you'll first see a color version, and if you click, you'll get the full-color, full-sized version of the image displayed as a Picassa Web Albums page. (Picassa is one of Google's sister services to Blogger, where the GLOSSARY is hosted.) To return to the GLOSSARY, just use your browser's BACK button.

Images whose captions end with an ellipsis (…) have additional notes attached to the full-sized image in the Picassa Web Albums COMMENTS field. These additional notes are not in the body of the ENTRY, since they pertain to aspects of the image that are not readily visible in the thumbnail.

All thumbnail images are overlaid with a small magnifying glass icon in their lower right corner, to indicate a larger version is available upon clicking. All full-size images are overlaid with a “watermark” in the lower right corner that says “Stockclerk.blogspot.com.” Please always be sure to give credit where credit is due.

Contributions of relevant, good quality photos are always welcome! However, per the notes under CONTACT INFO, if you provide images to the GLOSSARY, you are thereby agreeing that they become my property, to do with as I see fit, without any expectation or compensation whatsoever. That said, I also will make every effort to give credit where credit is due, and will put a reasonable photo credit in the image's Picassa Web Albums COMMENTS field.

Tab

Tab

n. A user interface device that visually simulates a filing folder's exdented label area.

NOTE: Here in the GLOSSARY, symbols, each letter of the alphabet, and a few additional categories like HELP are accessible via labeled Tabs in the blue banner area at the top of every page.