Jargon
One of my favorite things about diving deep into a new industry is discovering the jargon. A good set of terms can do wonders for allowing effective communication about complicated topics.
Of course there are countless examples of acronym craziness, words with cool etymologies (“dray” comes from Old Norse for drag) and many cases where new meanings come from existing nouns that get verbed, like “productionalize”.
But across my last couple jobs, I’ve noticed two examples that go even further: A new term is created by taking an existing verb that is used in ordinary English with a subject by moving the subject into the place of the object.
Grammar reminder: In “the boy pushed the rock”, the boy is the subject and the rock is the object.
At Flexport, determining the cost for a shipment is an important and complicated process. In normal English, you’d say “the shipment costs $10” where the shipment is the subject. But when you’re discussing the process, “costing” acts on the shipment and you end up saying things like “If you haven’t costed the shipment yet, wait until we productionalize our fix because recosting will be much faster then”.
At Chamberlain, I worked on transmitter (tx) and receiver (rx) radio devices used in remote controls. When you pair a tx with a rx, the process is called “learning” because two devices learn about the presence of each other and the codes necessary for authorized commands. And it got the same grammatical treatment. Learning became a process that an engineer does to a device rather than something the device does, so when I was told “make sure to learn the transmitter before lunch” they wanted me to run a program rather than learn new information.
Ultimately, I feel the cost of these learnings was nbd no cap. Isn’t language fun!