Although not ironic, I think the mathematicians I've known who use mathy words in real life are essentially aware of how unusual their usage is, and also that they can use these words because their conversant knows what they're talking about. (Examples range from a professor who opted for one path through the building, saying that another route was "isomorphic" to that one, to me describing an every-other-day schedule, which was cumbersome to describe using days of the week, as Z mod 2.) Maybe not ironic, but there is a certain playfulness to it, that sociolinguistic "you're one of us, you get what I mean lol" vibe to it.
I think the proper use of these kinds of words ought to understand why the participants talk that way and how the new word differs from old ones. Like, a mathy person giving directions to some random person on the elevator probably isn't going to be like, "Go straight down this hall until you come to an orthogonal intersection and make a half-pi rotation." One, they *know* the other person isn't going to catch that, and two, the use of technical terminology honestly doesn't give any benefit here. "Go down the hall and take the first left" is not only simpler, but more accurate. In contrast, grepping a bookshelf, as you say, describes a particular activity that's not quite *finding* the book (because it might not be there) and isn't quite *scanning* the bookshelf (because you do more book plucking and checking), so when you're looking at the bookshelf for a book of a particular size and plucking them out to check if they're the right ones, here "grepping" is genuinely more accurate.
So tl;dr I think there's a certain level of playfulness, but calling on technical concepts is useful in the presence of others who understand them when other descriptors seem more cumbersome. ("Then slice the tomato orthogonally...")
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Date: 2013-10-26 05:46 pm (UTC)I think the proper use of these kinds of words ought to understand why the participants talk that way and how the new word differs from old ones. Like, a mathy person giving directions to some random person on the elevator probably isn't going to be like, "Go straight down this hall until you come to an orthogonal intersection and make a half-pi rotation." One, they *know* the other person isn't going to catch that, and two, the use of technical terminology honestly doesn't give any benefit here. "Go down the hall and take the first left" is not only simpler, but more accurate. In contrast, grepping a bookshelf, as you say, describes a particular activity that's not quite *finding* the book (because it might not be there) and isn't quite *scanning* the bookshelf (because you do more book plucking and checking), so when you're looking at the bookshelf for a book of a particular size and plucking them out to check if they're the right ones, here "grepping" is genuinely more accurate.
So tl;dr I think there's a certain level of playfulness, but calling on technical concepts is useful in the presence of others who understand them when other descriptors seem more cumbersome. ("Then slice the tomato orthogonally...")