Latinorum

This is an evolving post... it's a collection of posh-"sounds-so-difficult" names for old, well known stuff.

The more difficult we talk, the more people will worship us as gurus and we can avoid any actual physical work and we can avoid having to ACTUALLY solve problems.
This was a common practice in the Middle Ages, professionals (doctors, lawyers, priests) would put enormous energies into learning Latin, so that nobody could understand what they were saying.

Synthetic transactions

http://www.nextslm.org/fishman.html#synthetic

Synthetic transactions are a way to check the availability of an application across a network. By definition, a synthetic transaction constitutes an automated, self-contained set of user operations that can be executed against a service in the same way a real consumer of the service operates an application. For example, on the Internet, a synthetic transaction includes a script that goes a stock trading site, tries to look up a stock's price or portfolio valuation, and reports if the series of operations completed successfully. In other words, any fixed set of user operations that can be automated reliably may be defined as a synthetic transactions.

"Synthetic" sounds like Alien technology, something that only Extraterrestrial intelligences can master.... cool!


Hydrate

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4929243/clarifying-terminology-hydrating-an-entity-fetching-properties-from-the-db

Hydrate is being used (often incorrectly) instead of the well known "populate" or "persist"... again, its association to a Chemistry term evokes a world of knowledge available only to few specialists...

Agile

I have been doing Agile for the first 10 years of my career, when I was coding for food... we were working on VERY tight budgets and even tighter deadlines.... we used to call it "get your fat stinky ass off that chair, work harder, when stuck raise a flag and get things done". It used to work like wonders, and we were delivering at least 10 times faster
than any corporate project I have ever seen.



Stakeholder

As defined here, "stakeholder is anyone who will make use of, develop, or have an impact on any aspect of your project". It sounds sooooo much cooler than "people concerned" !


Semantics

Some people say "the language doesn't have the SEMANTICS to do this".
Here an very clear definition of SEMANTICS:
"Semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions."

Probably if they used "the capability" or "the API" they would be more.... semantically correct!

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is another of those wonderful words to impress your audience. It means nothing more nothing less than Classification, but it will allow you to impersonate the Darwin or the Linnaeus of the block, leaving around you an aura of scientificity and holiness.

Patterns

Let's give the word credits: Patterns is an excellent sound bite, with the voiceless bilabial plosive "P" at the beginning sending your opponent to the ground.

Whenever in a discussion someone starts swaying the "Pattern" story around like Samson the ass jawbone

- maybe because he is the only person who has actually learned by heart the entire index of the GoF book -

I wonder "is this man trying to COMMUNICATE, or to INTIMIDATE?".