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Public Confused by Tech Lingo
the_helper_monkey writes "The BBC has an article about how tech jargon confuses the public. It's based on a survey done by AMD asking the definitions of words such as megahertz, MP3, and Bluetooth. " I was recently reminded of how big a deal this is while trying to help my tech novice brother select a computer. If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
British people wouldn't know how much a Library of Congress is, so how would they ever understand our explanations of how much a gigabyte is?
...logical history underlying the acronames "cd" and "ls" and how they are actually newmonic. ... It's like Mensa--you have to have a certain amount of brains to get in the door, which makes for a more pleasant experience among the intelligentcia.
Perhaps you mean acronym, mnemonic and intelligentsia.
This goes to show a long-held belief of mine that the more someone knows the language of IT (for example someone knowledgable in a Unix environment, and most programmers) the less they can understand the basics of the English language (or any other spoken language).
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!