As someone who works with a lot of interdisciplinary teams, I often understand concepts or processes they have names for but don't know the names until after they label them for me.
Until you use some concept so frequently you need to label it to compress information for discussion purposes, you often don't have names for them. Chances are if you solve or attempt to solve a wide variety problems, you'll see patterns and processes that overlap.
It’s often valuable to use jargon from another discipline in discussions. It sort of kicks discussions out of ruts. Many different disciplines use different terminology for similar basic principles. How those other disciplines extend these principles may lead to entirely different approaches and major (orders of magnitude) improvements. I’ve done it myself a few times.
On another note, the issue of “jargon” as an impediment to communication has led the US Military culture to develop the idea of “terms of art”. The areas of responsibility of a senior officer are so broad that they enter into practically every professional discipline. The officer has to know when they hear an unfamiliar term that they are being thrown off by terminology rather than lack of understanding. Hence the phrase “terms of art”. It flags everyone that this is the way these other professionals describe this, so don’t get thrown or feel dumb.
No one expects the officer to use (although they could) a “term of art”, but rather to understand and address the underlying principle.
It’s also a way to grease the skids of discussion ahead of time. “No, General, we won’t think you’re dumb if you don’t use the jargon, but what do you think of the underlying idea...”
Might be a good phrase to use in other professional cultures. In particular in IT, because of the recursion of the phrase “term of art” being itself be a term of art until it’s generally accepted. GNU and all that...
This gets even more fun when several communities discover the same thing independently, and each comes up with a different name for it.
My favorite is the idea of "let's expand functions over a set of Gaussians". That is variously known as a Gabor wavelet frame, a coherent state basis [sic], an Gaussian wave packet expansion, and no doubt some others I haven't found. Worse still, the people who use each term don't know about any of the work down by people who use the other terms.
Reminds me of self-taught tech. I’ll often know the name/acronym, but pronounce it differently in my head than the majority of people. Decades ago GUI was “gee you eye” in my head but one day I heard it pronounced “gooey” and I figured it out but had a brief second of “hwat?” (I could also see “guy” or “gwee”.) It’s, of course, more embarrassing when I say it out loud first...
First time I went to a Python conference in SV, more than a decade ago, I kept hearing "Pie-thon" everywhere, and had no idea what the hell people were talking about.
I took me a solid half hour to at last understand this pie-thingy was Python... in my head I had always pronounced it the French way. Somewhat like "pee-ton", I don't know how to transcribe that "on" nasal sound... (googling "python prononciation en francais" should yield a soundtrack for the curious non-French speakers).
Picture 18 year old me in 1995, I got a 486SX laptop as a graduation present out of the blue from my estranged father. I wanted to add an external CD-ROM to it so I could play games and load software for college, and it had a SCSI port. I went to the local computer store and asked the guy for a "ess see ess eye" CD-ROM drive, he busted out laughing and said "oh you mean a scuzzy drive?" Very embarrassing for me at the time but that's when I learned that computer acronyms have a preferred pronunciation so I should try to learn them myself to avoid future confusion.
it shouldn't be, it should be a badge of honor of some sorts - it points to somebody reading to expand their knowledge that is not available in oral form around them, so kudos to them !
It's even more visible in non-English speaking countries. In Poland: first everyone says Java as Yava and after a while they start to switch to a proper English pronunciation. Many times it divides amateurs from professionals, but I wouldn't really know, because I don't work with Java.
Great story, yes. But there's no such thing as a "halzenfugel" in German as far as I can tell as a native speaker. Even www.duden.de, the official German dictionary, doesn't know that word ;-0
As a native English speaker and middling foreign-language speaker of German, "halzenfugel" sounds to me like a mock-German word that an English speaker would make up.
Hah, good to know. However, unless you are talking to people from the same domain, it's usually a better approach to spell out things instead of relying on terminology. Concepts and ideas translate much better across domains than terminology.
