Here's your bespoke application. Thanks for your custom!

During the initial days of my assignment in the London office, I was bewildered by the term ‘bespoke application’. “They need a bespoke application for CRM.” What? The only time I had heard the words ‘spoke’ and ‘application’ in the same sentence was when someone told me about an application built on top of a hub and spoke architecture or when someone simply said “I spoke to him about the application.” :-P Well, I now know that ‘bespoke application’ means ‘custom built application’ or simply ‘custom application’. But I also realized why Londoners don’t use the word custom here. On my way out from a grocery, I noticed the message “Thank you for your custom” (meaning thank you for your purchase/patronage). Interesting localization tidbit.

2 comments:

Joshua Graham said...

Liked your CC100 idea... will try out on an upcoming Java project.

"Bespoke" was most commonly used for suits made specifically for a customer without the use of a pattern. In effect, the length of fabric was "spoken for".

"Made to measure" was a suit made from a pattern and then altered to fit the customer.

Perhaps applications truly composed in a service-oriented manner could be called "made to measure"? :-)

Anonymous said...

The post is a little old I know, but you might find this interesting:
I was recently asked to remove "Thank you for your custom" from a cashier system that I wrote, as this was found to be a bug: Incorrect English. My British English wasn't good enough for them!

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