Wednesday, May 30, 2012

How engineering affects your vocabulary














The other day, a friend of mine had some kind of seizure. After the first few reflexive first-aid actions , I gave a call to the ambulance. And when the person asked me to describe the symptoms, to my horror, I said "she is vibrating"! I immediately realized then, the effect that all these years of obsessive engineering had had on me. And then when I sat down one day to scrutinize my lexicon, I realized that well, vibrating was not even the tip of the ice-berg. 

Here are a few from the list

1. Infinite, Infi: Probably the most common of them all. Used to describe a feeling of extreme. "I am infi hungry!", "Infi bored", "Infi Assignments!" , "Infi pain!" "Infi peace!"

2. N: Synonym for infinite, the above statements might just as well go with n. Maybe they are just too lazy to say all the four syllables of infinite or just too much saturated from coding or linear algebra. "It was n easy da!"

3. Random: No, they won't call you crazy or mad, they won't call you weird. They will call you random or arbit (short for arbitrary).  This word goes for anything that doesn't connect the dots for them. "He is one random fellow!" "It was such a random paper (question paper was nothing what syllabus would have dictated)" "Random Intern" "Random presentation"

4. Function:  Not as popular as the above, but I have definitely seen a lot of people using that. e.g  "Your response to deciding the menu would be a function of your hunger, taste and budget". Mathematics professors love this word the most!

5. Put: This word is like a chameleon, different meanings in different contexts! "Put treat" "Put cash!" "Put eminem!"

6. Crash: We love this word, and most often end up doing in lectures. "Crash" our engineering synonym for "sleep", is what most of us need / want the most, but we end up doing infi-random philosophizing when it's time to crash!

7. Pack: We don't say, "Ok let's get over with it", instead, "Let's pack". "Pack the movie!" "Pack that girl!". I don't know where we derived that use from, but nonetheless, it fits very well in our daily interactions.

8. Pained, Loaded: Shakespear would have used troubled, bothersome, or any of the old archaics. A polished engineer would use stressful. But in a college, this part is an integral word of almost every sentence of a pessimist nerd, and on the night before exams, pretty much everyone! "Pained in life" "Pain prof!" "Pain assignment!"

9. Threshold: When Joey, in one of the episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S tells a beautician before she does his eyebrows, that "Hey lady, my threshold for pain is very high", I couldn't stop grinning and had to include that word in this list.

10. Light: No, not the light from Bibles 'Let there be light'. When we say light, we mean that the problem is not going to be a pain. Think of it as an antonym for pain.

I will add what Norman Lewis says after the end of every few chapters in his book Word power made easy "Now you will consciously see more of these words every day", and you'll say, "Hmm, there you go buddy!"

I know these are not the only reincarnates out there, but these were the only ones I could recall. 
Let me know of more!

Friday, May 18, 2012

Never Be Nice!




You've been there every single time they needed you.
You've been their guiding beacon, in times of adversity, rejection, destitution!
You've been their source of inspiration ever, if not anything less.
You've understood their implicit expectations, and satiated those before they realized they wanted it.

And what happened after all that?
You were tagged nice.
You were friend-zoned.
You were expected to take care of yourself when in agony.
You were expected to get things done for yourself, without the slightest hope of any help from anyone.
And no matter how explicitly you implied your expectations to that someone, all you got was a cold, subtle denial.

You helped people and they clung on to you for more.

You were taken for GRANTED!

You respected people and you were taken for granted.


You tell me, why would being nice be a motivation for anyone?