I have an article here. reposted From a sales perspective, the essence of the article is that information is neither transmitted nor received. It arises in a person’s mind in response to external stimuli. No matter what we say to the customer, what matters is not what we said, but what exactly came to the interlocutor’s mind in response to our mouth movements and vocal cords. The same signal can evoke different information in different recipients. And until we use the customer’s frame of reference and place them at the center of the universe, we cannot be sure that when we use the same words, we understand the same thing.
I practice a business strategy called speaking the client’s language. For example, when we sell aquarium fish to a teacher, we talk about how we help create a cohesive community in the aquarium that is free from internal conflicts. And when we sell acoustic systems to the owner of a funeral services company, we make sure to mention that we are not just offering acoustic systems, but solutions that help add a sense of solemnity to any event.
As an appetizer, I will quote a fable I wrote in 1997 after I participated as an intern in the assembly of the 4th power unit of the RAES. This fable has already spread across the internet. At that time, I was fascinated by all sorts of computer nonsense and information technologies, and I consequently saw my own reflections in the language of the assemblers.
Bakika, in my opinion, is an excellent illustration of what is discussed in the aforementioned article. From here on, there will be some profanity used. It’s the language of the installers, after all.
Any technological operation, no matter how complex, can easily be described using words derived from two nouns and one verb. This is not a metaphor!!!! The vocabulary used by installers also includes interjections, prepositions, conjunctions, and a number of technical terms (which they ultimately replace with more familiar words anyway).
Moreover, it has transformed into a kind of algorithmic language for them, where (drawing an analogy with Pascal):
- b.y — semicolon.
- p.z..c — end
- x.h. — the do construct, procedure (depends on the context), (or let in Basic)
- “ni x.ya” is a component of the if-then-else structure.
- to hell — exit from the loop.
- x.evina — initialization of an object, declaration of a local variable of a specified type.
- e.ate, e.ate — a loop with an implicit exit.
- long integer
- oh. shit — floating point overflow.
and so on.
Moreover, if you speak to them in a normal way, they don’t understand. But if you swear a lot (without any system), they get offended.
We got used to this system and developed a complete understanding with the installers by the 10th to 12th day of practice.
We have witnessed more than once how the foreman (a person with two higher education degrees who worked in Cuba for 10 years) explained the task to the installers in their own language, and he did it masterfully. Naturally, he would first declare the variables and objects, then write the subroutines, and only after that would he declare the algorithm. And, of course, he ended each block with the phrase: “p. z. e. c, b. y.” (see dictionary).
To an unaccustomed ear, it might sound like a continuous stream of swearing and cursing, but not to a professional. The richness of the vocabulary is, in fact, extremely vast. Take, for example, the joke about how “your colleague is getting molten tin dripped down his collar.” Mastering the language of the installers perfectly, the meaning of what is said can be compressed into a tight package of two or three words, which then automatically unpacks in the listener’s mind, prompting them to take appropriate action. It’s a kind of telepathy, or a V.34 protocol, with hardware resilience to interference and “hardware handshaking.”