Anyone who has worked in IT will be familiar with this phenomenon, and I'm not giving examples, you already know them. But in the general world of stuff there often comes along a stranger, exiled from their speciality and thrown out into the wider world. Such is the fat of Modality. Modality. It's a pleasant enough word; fills the mouth, elicits good lip movement and ends on a smile, or a grimace, depends.
Look it up and you'll see a bewildering array of definitions
1. The fact, state, or quality of being modal.
2. A tendency to conform to a general pattern or belong to a particular group or category.
3. Logic The classification of propositions on the basis of whether they assert or deny the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of their content. Also called mode.
4. modalities The ceremonial forms, protocols, or conditions that surround formal agreements or negotiations: "[He] grew so enthusiastic about our prospects that he began to speculate on the modalities of signing" (Henry A. Kissinger).
Thank You Farlex (free dictionary). The easiest explanation I've had so far is; 'the way you you stuff'.
I'm a Technical Trainer and I teach virtualization on VMware and the way I deliver training is changing. My company recently introduced two new delivery methods; I shan't bore you with what they are, I'm not selling here, but our boss introduced them as alternative delivery modalities. Now some of the guys I work with are really fucking clever, and at least three of them looked askance at this word, one even asked what it meant. I was lucky as a hypnotherapy training course I'm doing had already introduced me to the finer points of this word some two months earlier. Since then it's started creeping out into other disciplines (I even heard it used to describe emergent graphic novel delivery system, or how you read comics).
So, be aware of this word, it'll be coming to a seminar/talk near you, if it hasn't already. Prepare your aural receptivity modalities beforehand.
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