TITLE: A New Entry for my Vocabulary
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 18, 2006  6:24 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In my
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-09.html#e2006-09-18T18_03_58.htm">
   last entry</A>
I quoted a passage from Paul Graham's essay
<A HREF="http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html">
   Copy What You Like</A>.
Graham encourages students of all sorts to develop the
taste to recognize good stuff in their domain, and then
to learn by copying it.

My friend
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/">
   Richard Gabriel</A>
is both computer scientist and poet.  He has often talked
of how writers copy from one another -- not just style,
but sentences and phrases and even the words that catch
our ears, that sound just right when used in the right
place.

In that spirit I will steal, er, copy a word from Graham.

Most of the words that our discipline has added to the
broader lexicon are hideous abominations, jargon used to
replace already useful words.  The next time I hear
someone use "interface" as a verb in place of the older,
humbler, and perfectly fine "interact", well, I don't
know what I'll do.  But it won't be pleasant.  In this
vein, I did recently hear an unusual word choice from a
graduate student recently moved hear from Russia.  Instead
of "interaction", she used "intercourse".  It sounded
charming and had a subtly different connotation, but these
days in the U.S. I suspect that most folks would look
askance at you for this word choice.

But in "Copy...", Graham put a CS jargon word to good use
in ordinary conversation:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
It was so clearly a choice of doing good work <STRONG>xor</STRONG>
being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Standard English doesn't have a good word with the meaning
of "xor"; "or" admits the same confusion in regular
conversation that it does in logic.  But sometimes we really
want to express an 'exclusive or', and "xor" is perfect.

Now I'm on the look-out for an opportunity to drop this
word into a conversation!
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