="Wouter Meeussen" <wouter.meeussen@telenet.be>
More such underlying concepts (in any language) make for troubled
communication. Try ro read any publication, and you're swamped by nouns with
a particular meaning, known to all who know about such things, but pointing (but often not) the uninitiated to other places where they are 'explained'. Ha!
I agree, but moreover think this is an intrinsic difficulty that can only be surmounted by investing appropriate effort in each case. Technical terms by definition(!) rest atop a foundation of other such terms and their restricted interpretations. The amount of effort required to reach a common understanding depends on how much common vocabulary is shared to start with. There are no shortcuts. But the same applies to formal systems. Proofs starting from only axioms are more labor-intensive than those that proceed from derived results. Further, even the simplest words may carry wildly divergent connotations for different listeners that require effort to be brought into alignment. For example few years back my non-mathy wife and I realized that we react very differently to the word "problem". For her a problem is always a bad thing, a difficulty that must be overcome. Thus my unthinking mathy use of the phrase "interesting problem" in everyday contexts was to her an unsettling oxymoron. A friend still chuckles about inadvertently miscuing Bill Gosper to vastly overestimate his own level of understanding of some hypergeometric arcana, and the mutually unintelligible merriment that ensued. Another friend, reviewing a draft with me, noted that my inept phrase seemed to imply we were standing on our own shoulders. "I'd pay to see that!" So on top of the challenge of conveying the material itself, it can take considerable effort and empathic talent to monitor what you are saying, listening from the other guys shoes (so to speak).