These Are NOT Equivalent

June 4, 2008 – 12:21 am

Now that I'm into my third calendar month of publishing this, I thought I'd shake things up a little bit and explore some things that are not equivalent. And if you're wondering why former Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle is headlining today's installment, read on.

The odd thing is that this photo is from the invitation to the inaugural ball for George H.W. Bush. Despite all the good photos of Quayle (for all his faults, he was pretty photogenic), they decided to use one where he looks like he's trying not to fart.

Thing The First: "hits" and "page views"

Whenever I talk to someone who has a web site, I can tell they don't know how it works if they talk about how many hits it got. Hits are a technical term meaning one request for a file from your web server. If your home page has 3 graphics on it and an external stylesheet, one person viewing your home page one time represents five hits (the home page HTML document, the three graphics, and the stylesheet). Better metrics to use (and ones that makes you look like you know what you're doing) are:

• Page views: this is how many times the main document was requested and ignores all the hits on the supporting files.
• Uniques: This is the number of unique visitors your site had in a specific period. So if I came to your site three separate times today, I'd count as one unique visitor. If that's a big number, it can be more impressive than page views.

Sadly, it's easy to fall into this trap. I do sometimes, myself. The problem is that because people have heard "hits" so much, it's easy to talk down to them and use "hits" when you mean "page views" and you know the difference. We need to "elevate our discourse" on the topic and try not to use "hits" and "pageviews" interchangeably.

Thing The Second: "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less"

I'm not the first to point this out, but it seems some people still aren't getting the message. "I could care less" means that you actually do care, because you're stating that there's a lower level of care you could assign to the subject. It's when you "couldn't care less" that there's no smaller flying fig you could give.

Thing The Third:

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Oddly enough, I was describing this one to my neighbors. They laughed a little, but it turned out they had no idea that it was straight out of the October 5th, 1988 vice presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen.

Now, the incident to which this refers occurred over 19-and-a-half years ago, so it might have flown right by someone who's in their early 30s today. But, while it's not such a major turning point in American history that it gets taught to every high school student, it did warrant its own Wikipedia entry. And if you saw it live and experienced the aftermath as a politically aware adult, particularly if you were a Democrat, you havent forgotten it.

So, for all the readers who looked at this and didn't get it, there are a bunch of older folks (like my wife) who laughed heartily.

Got your own non-equivalents? Post them in the comments below.