From: ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett)
Newsgroups: soc.college.grad
Subject: Re: Engr. Courses vs LA courses (was Re: Any Humanities Grads out there?)
Date: 14 Apr 92 16:51:58 GMT
Article-I.D.: colorado.1992Apr14.165158.5388
Organization: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences

>
>In article <1992Apr14.061535.26424@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>, millerj@lambda.ecn.purdue.edu (Snide Pucker) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr14.032047.27956@eng.umd.edu> clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Lin) writes:
>>#>
>>#>  Try attending a senior
>>#>level course in an engineering course and a liberal arts course.
>>#>Chances are (unless you select some philosophy course) you'll be able
>>#>to understand about halh of what's going on in a liberal arts course
>>#>and none of what's going on in an engineering course.
>>
>>   Engineers seem to take a sick pride in having a firm grasp on terminology
>>   that no one else can understand.  The flagrant abuse of techno-jargon
>>   means that the rest of the "ignorant world" can blunder in the dark while
>>   engineers spout such combobulations as
>>
>>      "By linearising the higher-order expansions to the interfacial wave 
>>       perturbations, significant downscaling of the time-stepping is achieved."
>>
>>   Indeed.  Makes perfect sense to me (it had better, it's in my field)
>>
>>   There seems to be a belief that spouting techno-jargon translates to an
>>   understanding of the field (e.g. using buzzwords or catch-phrases).
>>   I consider it another way engineers distance themselves from the public.
>>   I don't trust lawyers for the same reason, too much reliance on cryptic
>>   phrasing and terminology.  
>>
It's not that engineers and lawyers want to distance people (OK, maybe some do),
the point is that naturally spoken english is a very fuzzy medium of
communication. That's terrific for some subjects, but for both engineering and
law, exactness is a virtue. Techno-jargon has it's very valuable place. If I 
want to talk to another EE about bipolar junction transistors, I don't need
to explain it, which is a good thing, because it would take hours to explain
what a BJT is and why it's called that. I doubt I could do it, because I am 
no longer familiar with every aspect of it. Furthermore, it would be absolutely
impossible to explain a BJT without some fairly complex math. I mean, I could 
give you some sort of explaination, but if you need to understand a BJT in
detail, it doesn't matter how smart you are, or how clearly I can communicate, 
you just have to know calculus, and quantum theory, and electricity. Now you
could say, sure, but you could explain all that too, and I could. It would take
about two years of steady work. That's what happens in engineering classes. And
after two years of that, when you finally understood a BJT completely, and your
Lit teacher asked you to explain it to the class, they would all complain that
you are spouting techno-jargon.

It's similar to someone complaining that they don't like Shakspeare because
of the 17th C. english. If you want to understand it, you just have to learn 
it, and once you do, you can't easily understand why someone would complain 
about it, and they can't understand why you think it's so important. 

Complex ideas require complex language to discuss them. If engineers and
lawyers had to say everything in layman's terms, it would take them
forever to express one idea. The techno-jargon is vocabulary of
words, each of which expresses a complex idea that would take many many
more words to express simply. And while it should ideally not be used
in a context where it is not understood, once you learn it, it is 
difficult to separate from everyday words that anyone would understand.

				Ed Hartnett