People in some technical professions use plain language — short words that sound like regular English. People in other highly technical professions do just the opposite.<\/p>\n
For example, civil engineers and plumbers use short English words to describe things. Words like “span” and “load”, “valve”, “pressure” and “pipe”.<\/p>\n
The language of doctors is quite different. Their words tend to be much longer and in latin. Finger is “phelange”, forward is “anterior”, down the middle is “sagittal”.<\/p>\n
It’s as though there are working class technical fields and upper class technical fields. Plumbers and engineers are working class — it’s all just about getting the job done. Doctors are upper class — it’s still about getting the job done, but it’s also about something else, something more rarefied.<\/p>\n
In computer science we tend to use simple English words when plying our craft, like “heap”, “stack”, “array”, “float” and “return”. I guess that makes us a working class technical field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People in some technical professions use plain language — short words that sound like regular English. People in other highly technical professions do just the opposite. For example, civil engineers and plumbers use short English words to describe things. Words like “span” and “load”, “valve”, “pressure” and “pipe”. The language of doctors is quite different. … Continue reading “Technical language”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20668"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20668"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20672,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20668\/revisions\/20672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}