sawyl | When is cumulative not cumulative?

I'd planned to spent today installing a number of incremental patches. That is, patches that need to be layered on top of each other. Patches I'd been in the habit of calling cumulative. Because they accumulate on the system.

But I was mildly startled when a colleage confidentally told me that the patches weren't cumulative. My mind raced. Had I been wrong? Was I suddenly able to skip hours of tedious work? Not a bit of it. The patches, he told me, were not cumulative because they didn't combine all the previous sets of fixes. When I objected to this absurd use of language, I was informed that it was standard IBM-speak:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master—that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

Well. Quite.