In English, Please

technoboy10 · Saturday, December 20, 2014


Coders and math geeks are often accused of “not talking in English”. We say things like

“In electronic codebook mode, we can forge request headers and iteratively discover the first byte of the next block in linear time”,

which clearly makes no effort to be understandable. But is this really only a problem with CS and math?

Gamers, for example, use their own version of English all the time.

“I’ll use my Sneak skill on the Splintertusk, and finish it off with Cunning Attack!”

So do musicians, writers, psychologists, dancers, even English majors (non-coordinate canonical clauses, anyone?).

The thing is, nobody really speaks English. Everyone has their own unique dialect with esoteric vocabulary, complicated syntax, or any other kind of additions to vanilla English.

And I think that’s part of what makes English interesting.

(thanks to hardmath123 and my sister for the quotes)