Seeing red

While editing a standards document this morning, I was reminded of an e-mail exchange that I had a few years ago on the mailing list for an entirely different standard. On this particular list, someone was discussing what bad things an administrator of a certificate authority could do if they abused their administrator rights. They called this a "rouge CA," and really didn't seem to understand why that particular term didn't mean what they thought it meant.

Apparently, people have been confusing the words "rogue" and "rouge" for quite a while. Some people tell me that this confusion became the most obvious in 1987, when people were discussing the game Rogue Trader, inadvertently turning it into a game in which players tried to make a killing trading in either cosmetics or other red-colored commodities.

In any event, after some discussion of the dangers of "rouge CAs," I had to add a comment or two to the discussion that didn't really relate to the security issues that were being discussed. I said that I hadn't heard of a "rouge CA," and asked if these were discussed in a standards document that I hadn't "red." I also made some comment about how I was skeptical about the very idea of "rouge CAs," and speculated that it really wasn't the kind of idea that a reasonable person would "make up."

This may not actually have been as funnny as I think it was.

The replies to my less-than-helpful comments showed that many people on this particular list really didn't understand the difference between "rouge" and "rogue." Based on the additional comments that tried to connect cosmetics and certificate authorities in some clever way, it seemed that one or two other people did, but most didn't.

Oddly enough, the people who were confusing "rogue" and "rouge" all seemed to be native speakers of English. People who had learned English as a second language didn't seem to confuse these two words at all. I wouldn't be surprised if similar mistakes, like marketing people talking about "flushing out" details instead of "fleshing out" details are also generally limited to native speakers of English, but that's a rant for another post.

Comments

[Brian]

Pure hilarity.