标签: jargon

Do you remember my recent post about the folks who believe that engineers could do with more social skills ( Click here )?   As Dave Typinski said: "With rare exceptions, engineers and scientists know as much about social skills as the rest of the world knows about engineering and science. In other words, everyone on the planet could stand to learn more and broaden their horizons." Dave then provided a really funny "Final Exam" against which we can all test our overall knowledge. In addition to this test, there are all sorts of other interesting things (both serious and humourous) on Dave's website at www.typnet.net . Thus it was that, while meandering my way around Dave's site, I ran across another really funny item that Dave was kind enough to say I could share with you here. I don't know about you, but every now and then I have to read research papers as part of... well... performing my own research for writing projects I'm working on. The problem is that I almost invariably find these papers to be really boring and hard to fight my way through (I'm talking about other people's papers of course ... my humble writings are acknowledged far and wide as being a delight to read :-) When reading these research papers, I've often thought to myself: "Are they really trying to tell me something or are they actually trying to NOT tell me something?" As Dave says on his site: "Do you ever wonder what the authors of research papers are really saying with all that stilted jargon?" Dave then goes on to provide the following "handy-dandy" translation reference (Dave credits this to Hodge, M. H., "A key to scientific research literature", American Psychologist, March 1962, p. 54.):