Useful words

[rhu]

Recently, I've found myself reaching for Talmudic terms in conversations with friends and co-workers, because there's no good English equivalent.

nafka meenah -- the practical consequence that turns an otherwise academic distinction into a question whose answer matters. (This came up in the discussion of the wording of a rule in a game, where there was an edge case where the interpretation of the rule affected the strategy of play.)

kal va-khomer -- if you think it's important in the case we've been discussing, it's even more important in this other case that I'm about to bring up! (This came up in a discussion of turning off write access to a source code branch.)

And of course there's the classic machatunnim, who are your child's parents-in-law.

Conversely, I had to explain retconning in shul a few weeks ago when it came up in a discussion of the narrative of Judah and Tamar.

So now I'm curious: What jargon have you used in a general context because it's the most precise or concise way of explaining something?

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

"iff" is the first one that jumps to mind.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Davka, as in "The phone rings davka as soon as I step in the tub." No English word really captures its combination of "precisely" and "ironically". Ironically, its grammatical opposite, lav davka can be replaced pretty well with "not precisely."

[introverte.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Rhu says this all the time.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

On a comment on someone else's LJ just recently I had occasion to use "hrair" in context.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

OK, that's a new one on me. What's it mean?

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I had to google it - it's "more than four" in the rabbit-language of Watership Down.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

Right, 'cos rabbits apparently can't count higher than four. It's kinda the rabbit equivalent of a bazillion—just a lot smaller bazillion than humans use.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I had to Google it too, and it was my LJ. (Imagine my confusion! I loved that book, mind you, but I loved it 25 years ago....)

[jadelennox]

fanwank
mary sue
retcon

deconstruct
signifier/signified
differance

pilpul

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

"Yak-shaving" is one I find myself teaching people all the time.

Also, what retconning goes on with the Judah and Tamar story?

[cellio]

I usually translate "kal va-khomer" (when I need to) as "how much the moreso". That's about as concise as I can make it.

I sometimes find myself using "kivyachol" (as if it were), and I have referred to some dives into undocumented source code as "exegesis".

This only happened once (so not a pattern), but I was once talking with a fellow Jewish geek about some bit of technical folklore (the architect who'd been there forever said this was why that was done originally) as "d'tanya" (it was taught in a baraita).

For non-Jewish jargon, "IFF", and I've been known to say that certain people talk like Vorlons. Oh, also "SEP field" (Someone Else's Problem), and I often talk about "consing up" a new whatever (old LISPer here), even when I'm talking about Java objects. :-)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

After a while, I start forgetting which things are jargon that I've pulled in from which fields. I did use "truthiness" as a crucial concept in a lecture this semester.