using slang

[Steve Lamb]

On Wed, June 11, 2008 2:03 am, Pierre Frenkiel wrote:
>    Who would you convince that writing "P.I.T.A." saves 50 minutes?
>    I never heard that insulting sombody saves time!

    As an explination, yes.  People understand that PITA is a general term. 
What would you suggest otherwise, we write out our grievances every
time?  Besides, PITA is not an insult to people in and of itself. 
Personally I find wireless networking under Linux, even KUbuntu, a PITA.
 Whom did I insult there?

    Furthermore I never said, nor implied, that was the only slang that
needed to be understood.  You are the one making the blanket statement. 
I'm sorry but time is saved when you can tell someone, "Just FTP the
file down to your server, untar it and diff it against what you have."

    FTP, untar, diff are all slang for, respectively, "Transfer using the
File Transter Protocol", "unpack the tar file, including uncompressing
it using the appropriate tool" and "use the diff tool to find any
differences between the remote and local copy".  Hell, even "Google it"
is slang!  I don't know about you but I am not about to stop using such
terms because people are unwilling to learn.

    When I enter into discussions in another technical field I know I am
going to have to learn their slang.  Perfect example being when I
started working for a casino.  I had to learn that "cage" meant the
customer facing bank on the floor and "pit" meant the area of the floor
where dealers and their managers (pit bosses) were allowed to enter
where customers were not allowed.  Neither of which had much to do with
animals.  Oh, and "floor" meant, specifically, the area of the building
where gambling took place and not any place where one was able to walk. 
How far do you think I would have gotten if I told them, "I'm not going
to learn all these terms, you should understand I don't know them and
use something that I will understand."

-- 
Steve Lamb