As a thread mirroring How bad is the jargon in your industry? This one is about your hobbies.
I play board games, usually European ones, and over the years have come to appreciate the jargons use - they help to summarise what the game is like but I guess they could sound really daunting. For example, you can describe the board game Age of Empires III like this - “This is a worker-placement, resources management game with elements of set collecting and you score by controlling areas”.
I’m primarily a videogamer and a home brewer.
I’d say that the jargon in videogaming is more specific than the homebrewing jargon. Most of the brewing jargon is the same for professional brewers as it is for home brewers, and most of it consists of terms for equipment or for stages of the process, and some of it is in German. (vorlauf anyone?)
Videogaming has a whole different set of terms that tend to change over time, although the big ones (camping, pwned, hacker, etc…) seem to stay the same.
Amateur Radio has no jargon.
Brewing jargon isn’t that bad compared to other hobbies. As bump noted, some of it is in German, and some of it is in scientific terminology, but most of it is easily learned and straightforward.
Come to the Great Ongoing Guitar Threadand check it out for yourself!
The short answer is: plenty. You have the basic jargon of guitar, makers, models and feature. On electrics, add the jargon of digital and analog circuitry - and if recording is involved, too. On acoustics, add the jargon of high-end tonewoods and other luthier craft. To both add the cork-sniffing jargon used to characterize tone and playability - and cap it all off with the fact that folks are trying to describe something subjective and experiential without being in the same room.
Oh, yeah - guitars are jargon-alicious…
Model horse collection/customizing/showing. You wouldn’t think there would be all that much jargon, eh? This might be a typical ad on a sales forum:
LSQ/PSQ AR CM ASB. Bay w/all the chrome! Top WP/WT prospect. $600 OBO
Translated out:
Live show quliity/photo show quality artist resin custom American Saddlebred. Bay w/ 4 white socks and a blaze! Top western pleasure/western trail prospect. $600 or best offer.
Lots of other abbreviations commonly used-
BNA- big name artist
NSH- National Show Horse
NAMHSA- North American Model Horse Show Association
NAN Q’d- North American Nationals Qualified
Trad- Traditional scale
CL-Classic scale
SM-Stablemate scale
PS- Peter Stone company
So many more, I’ve only scratched the surface here!
Poker would have to be up there. Here’s a typical narrative:
“I raised under the gun only to have the big blind re-raise 3x. I called to see the flop and then checked in the dark. My opponent bet and I went deep in to the tank. I decided to float a card but bricked on the turn. I checked again only to have my opponent double-barrel. I check-raised and my opponent called, so we went to the river. I put my opponent on a busted flush draw so I moved in. He folded and the pot was shipped”.
And that’s not even scratching the surface of poker jargon.
Sound engineering is pretty bad:
2-bus, fader, channel strip, console, preamp, amp-simulator, AD/DA converter, condenser mic, tube-condenser mic, dynamic mic, ribbon mic, cardioid, end-address, side-address, splitter, patch-bay, cross-over, Nyquis, nearfield monitor, flat frequency response, gain-staging, equalization, high-pass filter, low-pass filter, comb filter, DAW, ASIO, outboard gear, ITB, OTB, nibnob, bias, dBFS, RMS, limiter, compressor, pumping, latency, MIDI, suck-button, reverb, early reflection, convolution, soft-synth, plug-in, controller, bass trap, phase, phase-cancellation, parallel compression, loudness wars, noise floor, send bus, return bus, de-essing, 16/44.1, 24/96, mixing, mastering.
Those are just off the top of my head… And yes, you do have to know what most of that means. Or at least, everything except nibnob and suck-button – you’ll only learn about those when it’s tooooo laaaate.
Make total sense to me.
Of course, I have played games like that before, so I know what they’re talking about even if I don’t speak the specific jargon.
(But that brings back memories of when I was just starting to get into tower defense games, and I had to figure out terms like “splash” and “poison”…)
Most of that’s equipment though; I’m not in the least bit musical, but I know what high pass and low pass filters are, as well as crossovers, different kinds of microphones, and most of the computer-related stuff as well.
I wouldn’t call that ‘jargon’ really. I always thought jargon was specialized terms and phrases used by insiders, (i.e. ‘suck button’), not a digital format (MIDI).
I also shoot some, and I haven’t found shooting to be terribly jargon-rich. Plenty of technical terms, but little in the way of jargon.
Sailing, the entire activity is jargon.
Wargaming, stuff like enfilade, melee, phase line and such is of course not specific to the hobby but ASL is an entirely different language. *
Gardening is relatively jargon-free unless you count Latin (botanical) names for plants.
One form of jargon I find annoying is used in the nursery trade, where plants are referred to as “plant material”. This even finds its way into ads, like one for a local garden center: “Great plant material arriving every day!”
When they call it “material” I get the idea that a big shipment of plant fragments (stems, leaves, roots) is on its way.
“Ya, bulk chlorophyll is on aisle 11. Lignin is 30% off, aisle 4.”
My hobby is eventing (horse sport with three phases: dressage, cross-country jumping, stadium jumping); for a non-horsey layperson, there can seem like a fair amount of jargon. Some of it is horse-specific words, while some is just regular English words put to use in non-intuitive ways that have additional layers of meaning for the in-geeks. You have general horse jargon: descriptions of horses (breed, color, etc., plus subjective qualities like “game” “honest” and “green”), description of anatomy and gaits, etc. Then you have the names for different types of cross-country obstacles: coffin, half-coffin, trakehner, water, drop, sunken road, brush, palisades, oxer, corner, etc. And on and on: names for different faults or behaviors, descriptions of the course, etc. When you ask someone how an event went, they might say something like this:
My OTTB (off-the-track Thoroughbred) greenbean (young, “green” horse) was sticky (not moving forward freely) in dressage and blew his canter transitions (did not move from trot to canter when asked); the judge told us we needed more impulsion (forward motion/energy) and bend (lateral flexion of the spine). On cross-country, he was forward and took a flyer (enthusiastic jumping effort, taking off far away) at the first two fences but settled down. He propped (almost stopped, took a long hard look) at the water (small pond of water with jumps in/around it that the horses must splash through) and we ended up with a stop at the in of the half-coffin (first part of two-part obstacle including a ditch and a regular jump). It wasn’t dirty (abrupt stop at the last moment), though, he just ran through my left rein (ignored cues on the left trying to keep him straight).
In stadium, he was very honest. He chipped (took an awkward extra step too close to the jump) at the liverpool (jump with plastic water-filled decoration underneath) and we took a rail (knocked down the top part of the jump), and we got in deep (took off fairly close to the jump) to the in and out (two jumps set a stride apart) but he sat on his butt (rocked his weight onto his haunches) and jumped it like a champ.
Not sure it counts as a hobby, but I frequent a couple of discussion boards for frequent flyers dedicated to maximizing the benefits of the various frequent flyer schemes. Like all things associated with aviation it is crammed full of jargon.
I used to sail, which has already been mentioned - whole days would be spent on training courses learning how to tell your sheets from your lines. Then there would be the added difficulty of sailing with somebody who learnt different terms for some of the parts - cunningham/downhaul, centreboard/dagger board (technically two different components but they do the same thing depending on what boat you’re sailing), beating/tacking…
Roleplaying games has minor amounts of slang, some of it system dependent - hit points might be known as wounds elsewhere, and spell resistance known as ping, for example. A bigger barrier to entry might be the nerd culture references - you’d better be up to speed on your Monty Python and Star Trek trivia.
Wow, I’d call it a quasi-Euro board game. (Though it’s more American styled, really.) But yeah, it is those things.
Any community around a single game has its own cant. Sometimes this spills out into other similar games. (Such as referring to “life” and “tapping” in CCG’s that are not M:tG.) Conversely, in some MMO’s I would expect different dialects in different servers.
Fandom & informal criticism (from things like CassToons [superhero comics] to Television Without Pity to TV Tropes) tend to a mix of industry jargon & deep in-jokes that sometimes become jargon. But it’s usually not that bad.
I don’t think I know much jargon for gardening & tree-planting, but that’s something I sort of do alone.
Another wargamer checking in. If you get into military wargaming you encounter terms like chits, CRT’s, hexes, steps, VP’s, and ZOC’s.
Worst draft ever. Make the finals. Lucksack dropped three mythics, turns four, five and six. Must be nice.
I wrath. he has the counter. Obv. At this point I just concede. I side in all my hate, cause mise, right?
Game 2? Gruesome encore. He drops the GG. I log.
(Magic Online)
I don’t fly MMO flight sims anymore, but I do occ. drop into one of their forums to see what the latest state of the art is (usually I am not impressed, and remain on the ground). Anyway, I was one of the original Air Warriors on GEnie 20+ years ago, and a lot of the jargon we coined back then is still being used by the MMO aces now-like “dweeb” for newbie, or “vultch” for hovering over an airfield and bouncing planes which are taking off. I guess once a particularly apt bit of jargon is coined, it sticks.
I suppose it’s not that bad for those whose primary language is English, but when you speak one language and play a game that’s in another, the two languages merge into an unholy mess of bastardized words, jargon, badly pronounced English and whatnot. Not to mention our GM sometimes despairs when we take a name of one of his heroic NPCs (Brother-Sergeant Agamorr) and twist it into badly translated Finnish (Veli-Kessu Äkämörri).
IIRC Nava posted in some other thread how it is pretty much the same in Spain.