Robert Winny sent me two questions: “Is there a specific title for someone who designs cardboard boxes? And why the spelling difference between program and programme?”

Welcome to my life. Not just the random queries I receive, and the days spent fossicking answers, but also the likes of Robert’s email. A dozen land per week, my inbox a can of words, with topics as arbitrary as “What do you call a lover of lighthouses?” Or: “How long’s a jiffy?” Given the avalanche, you’d appreciate why I can’t reply to each question in person, though I do try to tackle each mystery, out of curiosity if not duty.

One-sixtieth of a second, being one tick of a computer’s system clock, is a jiffy’s duration, according to IT coders. While in the Astle house, a jiffy is half a sec, or roughly two shakes. As for a lighthouse lover? Try a beaconnoisseur.

Yet returning to Robert’s stumpers, let’s start with the box-maker. The sensible answer is a packaging engineer, said Bradley Farr, replying to my online plea. Visiting FEFCO (or Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers), I learnt more inside-the-box jargon, from FOL (Full Overlap) to PTB (Partial Telescope Box). Next time you unpack an HSC (Half-Slotted Container), take a jiffy to admire its die-cut defence against “compression, impact, rupture and pilferage”.

Among the less sensible answers, however, the web’s neologists made hay, proposing a box designer is a paper-shaper, a cubist, a cartonist, a cat-home architect, a crease monkey, a chairman of the board, a manila folder, or a Pratt. If nothing else is certain, the wordsmiths online are “incorrugable”.

Loading

Leaving me with Stumper #2, the program/me muddle, and how to spell the word. Again, not a simple question, partly due to that same IT crowd playing a role. Historically, program referred to a meeting’s agenda, posted in the village green for the civic record. This sense lies in its Greek lineage, where program is literally a forward-word, just as telegram is a distant-word, cryptogram, a hidden word, while a stripper-gram’s the naked truth.

Notice the me-free nature of all those grams? This trimmer spelling prevailed for centuries until British English had a scandalous liaison with French in the early 1800s, the natives somehow recovering from the shock of the Norman invasion. Program morphed to reflect this dalliance, the longer, Frencher spelling of programme applying to playbills as much as curricula.

No surprise, Americans resisted this whole European fling, adhering to program’s original form, and kicking -me to the kerb. Just as IT coders, first cited in 1945, converted the noun to verb, a move set to sway our subsequent sense of the word’s spelling, no matter the context. This trend is mirrored by more younger Australians who know shopping trolleys as carts, swayed by the language of online shopping, which nowadays is just called shopping.

But getting back to the program, and its fancier mini-me sibling, programme remains in local usage mainly as an event’s keepsake, a seminar’s run-sheet, or possibly a TV programme, but only just. The tide is turning. Conducting a news sweep of recent months, from the Wild Desert Program at Cameron Corner to the Supercars program in Bathurst, the -me spelling is dwindling fast, most writers favouring the IT/US default in most settings. If you ask me, I’d let -me loose. Or failing that, to channel the world’s box-makers, please handle the dilemma with care.