In a British newspaper article it reads: "In fact, Mr. Blunkett has not quite executed the U-tum on asylum for which he has been both jeered and praised".

I guess it must be ultimatum, for otherwise it doesn’t make any sense to me. But anyway, where did the writer took that abbreviation from? Or am I mistaken?

What do you think?

I believe the term is really "u-turn"—an informal expression meaning "reversal".

-Tim

Yeah… Tim, you’re very right… I realised short after posting the topic… ¬¬ I had never seen that "U-turn" and, since ultimátum is something  you constantly see over here about certain issues, I took it for nearly granted that it meant such thing. :D

Thanks anyway…xD

    WS.

Yes, "ultimatum" was a good guess!  I confirmed my suspicions by searching on the term "u-tum", and one of the hits was a log of meeting notes or something that had been captured… I think either they were OCR’ed into the computer or the person typing the notes couldn’t read the writing.  Anyway, on that log I noticed that when I search for "u-t" there were several hits, some "u-tum" and some "u-turn", which cemented my opinion for you, since all the "u-tum" entries in that log were obvious mis-readings of "u-turn".

Your quote was difficult to determine what was intended, though.  I think "ultimatum" would also be a logical interpretation.

-Tim

strange that u-turn can propagate over the internet and become u-tum without  too many people noticing.  Because to me, I didn’t  even see it (visually, they look pretty much the same)  but someone typed it and someone else copied the text and didn’t notice that they were not even typing a known word in english.

That goes back to anders’ lament over standard English typefaces…

-Tim