Geek Speak

Professions have jargon. Abbreviations and lingo seem necessary - we get too tied up in lengthy and technical phrases otherwise. It'd be impossible to get any work done if we spent all of our time enunciating the proper or plainspeak names for the concepts we spend so much of our time discussing.

Of course, that same lingo describes to the outside world what you do by association...

HTML, JSP, ASP, kernel, O/S, MB, priority queue, virtual machine, polymorphism, asynchronous transfer mechanism, Steiner Trees, NP-complete, Runtime analysis... you're clearly talking tech.

Tortfeasor, Res Ipsa Loquitur, Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc, Malum In Se, Replevin, Adjudication, Mens Rea, Prima Facie, Quid Pro Quo, In Forma Pauperis, summary judgment, vicarious liability, then you're talking law.

GDP, MPC, I, X, M, externality, PPF, indifference curve, present discounted value, marginal cost, Ceteris Paribus, oligopolistic competition, competitive advantage, inelasticity, utility function... econ.

It distinguishes the profession. It's one of many traits. It leaves some onlookers in awe - it leaves others in disgust. It sets you apart in a good way - it's a campaign ribbon that speaks to the world and to your peers where you've been in a professional sense. It sets you apart in a bad way - only geeks talk like this. Sometimes, people ride the coattails of jargon, pretending erudition through mimicked command of outwardly mysterious and indecipherable terminology.

And sometimes it confuses you. Let's just say that JSP and ASP appear to mean different things in law school than they do in the CS department. And that 'pi' and 'delta' are functionally overloaded in law school for anyone who has a background in math or science. This confuses me frequently...

The internal division is harder to maintain than I might have once thought.