You know, with some docs you want to look at their background or their bio or their CV to decide if they’re any good. The endodontist I’m working with made it really easy: he has his challenge coin rack in the lobby, including coins from Bethesda and Walter Reed. I am impressed.
This also means that we’ll speak in phrases that confuse his lovely assistant, a wonderful local gal who, despite living less than 10 miles off a military base, has apparently led a life blissfully free of military humour. Like earlier this week, when the dude before me ran really long, and we’re 45 minutes late starting on round 2 of fixing my face…
Doc: “I’m very sorry about the wait. We had to get the room sterilized after the last patient.”
Me: “Doc, relax! Like I told your receptionist, it takes as long as it takes. I’m really used to hurry up and wait.”
Doc’s shoulders drop fractionally, in a mild look of relief that I’m not going to ream him out for life being life, and surgery being worse than expected. “Thank you.”
Me: “Besides, I’m just happy you’re actually fixing my face, instead of telling me to take some ibuprofen, drink a bottle of water, and change my socks.”
Doc’s lovely assistant all but cocks her head to the side in confusion.
Doc grins, and jibes back: “You listened!”
Me: “Yeah, and I actually did all those things, too, between the last time you worked on me and now!”
Next time I go in, I’ll explain to the lovely assistant that “hurry up and wait” and a medic telling you “take some ibuprofen, drink a bottle of water, and change your socks” are two phrases one often hears on base or from the military when things have gone sideways and all is not proceeding as planned. It’s just a joking way to explain that I really, truly, am not bothered by it.
On the other end of the spectrum, I once had a coworker ask me to explain what I meant when I took over a call from her that was going FUBAR, when I said “Look, sir, you’re dealing with a government-committee designed (thing) enacted by the lowest bidder. The only faint praise I can damn it with is that it’s not mil-spec.” She understood that was a magic incantation to make the Blackhawk pilot who was Very Unhappy burst into laughter, relax, and be receptive to the information we could provide on dealing with (the thing)… but what was so bad about a government committee design? What is this terrible thing called “milspec”?
Yes, I had to explain committee design… fortunately, she had suffered through group work in high school, so that made sense. As did, eventually, lowest bidder. Neither of them were phrases that would come naturally to her tongue to deservingly demean a thing, nor would she have thought to explain the problem that way…
She threatened to get me a plaque that listed my title as “Speaker To Military Pilots”.
But here’s the thing. I’m a cake-eating civilian. (Although the last time I emphatically said that to a warrant officer, he skeptically replied, “You know they don’t call themselves that, ma’am.”) I just… listened to my family, my friends, fellow pilots, my husband, acquaintances, coworkers, bosses… and even the books I’ve read and podcasts I’ve watched in which the guys relaxed enough to let the natural humour and phrases flow.
This really comes in handy writing military – because veracity isn’t just keeping the ranks straight and making sure I don’t have a corporal saluting a sergeant, it’s in the humour, and the handoffs, what fills their downtime, and the decisions they make, informed by the mindset they have.
So similarly with any specialized field… I love Becky Jones’ and Alma Boykin’s books because they manage to not only make life in academia and all its petty power politics (“the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small”) true to life, but bring out the humour and the humanity in it with all the fun asides including “the grad students did what now?”
Even fields I don’t know – if the author does, and you can tell by the codes in which they naturally speak – it makes the story come to life, and leap off the page.
What fun phrases that code which specialty have you run across lately?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Speaking in Code”
I think of all the “in-group” occupational (and other) dialects to be subsets of general dialectical “snark”. They’re a combination of the actual phrases as well as the exaggerated rhetorical versions of them in fiction and film (available to outsiders to pretend credentials). This means that they don’t just represent in-group credentials, they also establish communication credit for using them cleverly (in a communication context) or sardonically (when muttered privately for the reader’s or bystander’s amusement in recognition of FUBAR.)
We understand the snark references of many cultures of which we are not actual direct participants, and can often recognize the code (yes, alas, the clueless are always with us). It’s like dropping into dialect, or a broad caricature of dialect, for amusement, status signals, and so forth.
So, for fictional uses, I treat it more like semi-private rhetoric (the expanded vocabulary version) than as in-group affirmation — my characters aren’t generally much into affirmation requirements to establish credentials — they assume their normal speech will carry any necessary clues in most situations..
That said, for non-snark non-rhetorical purposes, it’s a good method to establish group membership and the degree of comfort (or not) with status within that group.
Responding more directly to your question about particular examples…
In-code references don’t always appear the way you might expect. My most in-group coded membership was as an early techie (from Friden-machine and telex abominations with punched paper tape thru the first spreadsheets through mainframes, commercial data centers, laptops, etc..
Instead of situational/administrative coded speech, lamenting the all-too-perverse incompetence of human organizations and rules, my in-group settled on shorthand references to “tech we had met and deplored”, the more exotic and obscure, the better the war stories and thus the credentials. A meet-and-greet of techies my age was a flurry of trade and product names, with an air of “topper” stories about the most ridiculous (and temporary) technologies of a nascent industry.
That was for the technical in-group. For the related/crossover business startup in-group of early tech businesses (a language I also spoke), in-group credentials were all about amateur business builders and credulous financing, i.e., “inevitable business failures I had known” offered up for amusement. That part of the tech in-group culture is alive and well. Still, the in-group references are shorthand references to famous failures (or occasional successes) — notorious corporate failures — rather than to the mechanics of operation (like military unavoidable human admin). We lay blame on particular failures rather than the industry, where the milspeak blames more broadly human foibles.
Engineering and programming. “There is always one more #@*! bug!” “The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90%.” “If one ship can cross the ocean in 10 days, that does not mean 10 ships can cross the ocean in 1 day!” (alternatively, “Getting nine women pregnant will not produce a baby in one month!”)
Mostly, trying to convey the fact that physical reality is what it is, and can not be governed by schedules, deadlines, or the wild fancies of the marketing department.
“When reality fails to conform to your theories, it’s not the universe that’s wrong.”
“Any software product shipped on time is the 0.8 beta version and was pushed out by Marketing, wait for v1.1 or later before implementing.”
In my job I remind the new juniors that every question I ask a customer during a meeting cost the company money when we got the answer wrong, and every question the customer asks, no matter how stupid you think it is, has the same scar behind it. Just like safety rules are written in blood, my questions are written in money.
“Any software product shipped on time is the 0.8 beta version and was pushed out by Marketing, wait for v1.1 or later before implementing.”
In my job I remind the new juniors that every question I ask a customer during a meeting cost the company money when we got the answer wrong, and every question the customer asks, no matter how stupid you think it is, has the same scar behind it. Just like safety rules are written in blood, my questions are written in money.
More from the software side of the house:
“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”
“Any problem can be solved with another level of indirection.”
“It compiled? Ship it!”
From my days of medical residency:
“Don’t buy any green bananas” (a patient who doesn’t look good)
“Positive teddy bear sign” (in a hospitalized *adult* – doesn’t bode well for explanations/communication with said patient)
“Positive porcelain test” (the patient is a crock)
Doctor humor. Some days it’s all we got.
Rubber-duck debugging. Explained its use for writers in my substack
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/a-brief-account-of-rubber-duck-debugging
Though there’s also Sneakernet. Had to explain it some young programmers, and its advantages for throughput and also for security. (If you want real security, send half by Internet and half by Sneakernet.)
Sometimes I think authors can get too impressed by their jargon. I get it, you wore a uniform. Now just stop and let me read the story.
Yep, too many acronyms, especially without context, are never fun. I try to keep it to a dull roar, despite working all day in a field whose federal bureaucracy loves its TLA’s – Three Letter Acronyms!
One that I ran into in my college years that stuck with me—maybe because it was never in the Malory or Victorian-era Arthuriad—was when Parzival’s mentor in Wolfram’s Parzival Drills into him the need to wash the rust from his face whenever he takes his helmet off. It’s such a commonplace detail that you really wouldn’t think about, but for men wearing steel casques on their heads all day, it makes perfect sense. And that’s what cinched the author’s bio for me as having actually been a mediaeval knight himself.
Cool! (or, um, sweaty… depending).