# Words that have a different meaning in your profession than generally **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 13, 2021, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865 "2021-02-13T23:39:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Author\_Balk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/81 "2021-02-16T18:58:28Z")
Overheard in a meeting… I remember master/slave being used in IT. Based on a comment that someone said this may not be considered appropriate anymore. The guy corrected himself and said that it was a “bad word”. And, I don’t see “cloud” in the comments (but I could have missed it). That is a fairly new IT concept. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/82 "2021-02-16T21:11:58Z")
The word “substandard” almost always means failing to meet the required quality standard, inadequate. But occasionally when used by metrologists, it means almost the opposite. A substandard is a very high quality dimensional reference that has been calibrated directly against the standard. I say “occasionally” because when I googled I could find very few examples of the word being used in this way. It’s possible that people in the field no longer use the term because it is so likely to be misunderstood. Just to prove I’m not making it up, there are two examples in this book: [Dimensional metrology : Subject-classified with abstracts through 1964 (govinfo.gov)](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-6c76cfc1453f6d3c1fe7f6527ae41527/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-6c76cfc1453f6d3c1fe7f6527ae41527.pdf) “The use of the [Michelson] interferometer as a substandard of length is also discussed.” “Methods used for comparison of substandards are described in detail.” ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/83 "2021-02-16T21:29:09Z")
Boring Data refers to a log of soil borings. ---
**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/84 "2021-02-16T22:05:40Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > … a log of soil borings. I imagine for most that there is substantial overlap with the conventional meaning. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/85 "2021-02-16T22:08:19Z")
> [@leahcim](#): > > I imagine for most that there is substantial overlap with the conventional meaning. 🙂 Oh, I think boring data for archaeological reasons could be quite interesting! ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/86 "2021-02-16T23:14:55Z")
> [@leahcim](#): > > > [@BobLibDem](#): > > > > … a log of soil borings. > > I imagine for most that there is substantial overlap with the conventional meaning. 🙂 Indeed. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/87 "2021-02-16T23:45:18Z")
One from the world of lighting design: “lamp” means the bulb, the word for the fitting that most of us would call a lamp is “luminaire”. ---
**Author:** ![Bootb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19b73/32.png) [@Bootb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bootb)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/88 "2021-02-17T00:05:12Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > “Glass” means lenses to us. Back in the film days “dunking” meant developing your film by hand (like I might say, “I used to shoot and dunk film for a wire agency.”) “Soft” is a nicer word for “blurry” or “out of focus.” “Soft” is also used for the situations when the photographer WANTED the pic to be out of focus (say for artistic reasons). ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/89 "2021-02-17T01:23:20Z")
That is correct; my definition does not take intentionality into account either way. Even if the blur is intentional, the word “soft” is nicer than “blurry” or “out of focuse.” ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/90 "2021-02-17T01:51:51Z")
I’m a chemist. The list is very, very long. But let’s start with both organic and chemical. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/91 "2021-02-17T16:22:35Z")
I saw on Amazon some “organic” sulphur. ---
**Author:** ![Limmin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f04885/32.png) [@Limmin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Limmin)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/92 "2021-02-17T17:35:33Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > With photography, there’s a lot of crossover with weaponry words like “shoot/shooter,” but most people are aware of that, I think. But it can get a little odd-sounding when you ask someone if you shot so-and-so, or saying something like “dude, hurry up, you gotta go shoot 'em!” to your second photographer. I remember being startled by a friend referring to the pictures of performers (in the guide given out by the ushers) as “headshots.” My only knowledge of the term came from video gaming. Marcomm terms (such as “rivers”): I worked at a small software company in marketing, where the CEO and chief marcomm person were, shall we say, largely self-taught. I learned a bit about the trade and its terminology by osmosis–from their work–as I focused more on the in-person technical part of the marketing side. I learned that text formatting is a lot deeper than I thought. And almost everyone with a little common sense believes they’re an expert at it (but they don’t know what they don’t know–“high resolution JPG” anyone?). I got some flak from them for using aerospace terminology from time to time, like “nominal,” where normal people would have used a different word, apparently. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2021, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/93 "2021-02-18T15:23:19Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Yeah, I overheard my wife (who’s in finance) on a conference call in the car talking about servicing some client’s jumbo. Wait, was she in finance before you overheard her? Or did you confront her and she replied “Well, see, honey, I’m in finance…” _“You are?”_ “Ummm, sure, international residential loans!” _“But I thought you were…”_ “A marketing consultant? Well, that’s just a title in… international residential financing. Nope, that’s it, I am and have always been a home loan person where it’s perfectly reasonable to service a Mr. Richardson’s jumbo. So how about those Knicks, huh?” ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/94 "2021-02-19T01:14:15Z")
Retail managers try very hard to prevent their inventory from shrinking. They’re not worried about their products getting smaller; _shrink_ is the difference between _book_ and _physical_ inventory. Or, translated from jargon, between the value of merchandise recorded and the value of the merchandise physically present in the store; the difference between what you’re supposed to have and what you actually do have. In my company, the loss prevention guys spend more time fighting shrink than they do going after shoplifters. _Turns_ is another one; it refers to how quickly a product sells. If you get 10 widgets in on Monday and they’re all sold by Wednesday, they have high turns - they “turn over” quickly. > [@LSLGuy](#): > > We have lots of technical terms of course, but I’m struggling to find too many that really don’t relate to more common usage. > > One that comes to mind is “ceiling”. For us, a ceiling is the bottom surface of a mostly solid layer of clouds. So ceilings only exist outdoors. Which is the one place you won’t find a ceiling in ordinary usage. > > Of course the underlying broad meaning is the same: “Mostly flat surface somewhere overhead” How about “ramps”? I don’t think many people outside the aviation industry would picture a flat stretch of concrete when they hear the word “ramp”. Or think of “taxi” as a verb. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/95 "2021-02-19T01:21:25Z")
Nichelle Nichols told a story about her first encounter with lighting terminology (Star Trek was her first TV role, I think). “She’s black” is not a description of her, when said by a lighting tech - it just means that she’s not well-lit. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/96 "2021-02-19T02:20:56Z")
> [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > Or, translated from jargon, between the value of merchandise recorded and the value of the merchandise physically present in the store; the difference between what you’re supposed to have and what you actually do have. In my company, the loss prevention guys spend more time fighting shrink than they do going after shoplifters. > > _Turns_ is another one; it refers to how quickly a product sells. If you get 10 widgets in on Monday and they’re all sold by Wednesday, they have high turns - they “turn over” quickly. Your sentence seems to imply shrinkage doesn’t include shoplifting. Or perhaps I’m reading more into it than you wrote. I thought shrinkage was mostly shoplifting, whether aided and abetted by insiders or not. Or is shrinkage more about damaged or spoiled goods? Or about insider theft, with shoplifting another category altogether? Funny enough, “turn” is also an airline term with several meanings. Thanks for triggering me to remember that. For crew, a “turn” means a 2-flight out-and-back trip. i.e. report for work at home base, fly to XYZ, then immediately fly back to the base, and then go home. Contrasted with the more typical domestic trip which is a multi-flight multi-day peregrination around the country with 1-4 consecutive overnights in hotels before returning home. Or the typical long haul intercontinental trip of flying across an ocean to XYZ, laying over for 12-36 hours then returning home 1, 2, or occasionally 3 days after you left. In general turns are considered desirable trips for senior folks in that very little time away from home is wasted; it’s almost all paying work. Though they’re much more popular with the people who live in the base and near the airport than the folks who drive 4 hours to get to work or, worse yet, live in another city and fly to the base to start work. The airport ground team has sorta the opposite meaning for a “turn”. For them a “turn” is the process of receiving an inbound airplane at a gate, unloading it, cleaning it, fixing it if necessary, fueling it, reloading it, and sending it back on its way. They also use “turn” as a time measure. As in “We have a 50 minute turn planned for flight 1234” meaning that if everything is on schedule the airplane will be in the gate for exactly 50 minutes and all those tasks must fit in that timespan. ---
**Author:** ![SCAdian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scadian/32/3292_2.png) [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/97 "2021-02-19T02:29:45Z")
As a submariner: Deck, sail, screw, crank, scram, fish… ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/98 "2021-02-19T03:18:25Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > > [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > > > Or, translated from jargon, between the value of merchandise recorded and the value of the merchandise physically present in the store; the difference between what you’re supposed to have and what you actually do have. In my company, the loss prevention guys spend more time fighting shrink than they do going after shoplifters. > > > > _Turns_ is another one; it refers to how quickly a product sells. If you get 10 widgets in on Monday and they’re all sold by Wednesday, they have high turns - they “turn over” quickly. > > Your sentence seems to imply shrinkage doesn’t include shoplifting. Or perhaps I’m reading more into it than you wrote. I thought shrinkage was mostly shoplifting, whether aided and abetted by insiders or not. Or is shrinkage more about damaged or spoiled goods? Or about insider theft, with shoplifting another category altogether? Yes, I was a bit ambiguous. Shrink does include shoplifting, and internal theft. But theft is a relatively minor percentage of shrink. (Caveat: organized retail theft chains, of which there are many, can cost the company serious money; San Francisco police recently caught one that had stolen about $1,000,000 from seventy different stores along the West Coast. But the guy who crams a package of batteries down his pants, or switches labels on a pallet of plywood, only accounts for a small part of a store’s shrink.) Most shrink is the result of poor record-keeping or not following proper procedures: not taking markdowns correctly, or selling merchandise under the wrong SKUs, or even just plain losing things. I caught a big one yesterday, as a matter of fact: a customer came in to cancel an installation, and the cashier, not knowing how to process the cancellation, simply marked down the entire $2,000 cost and refunded him his money. Which got her a conversation with a manager and some quick retraining. Fortunately, I noticed the error and was able to correct it, but if it had flown under the radar, it would have resulted in $2,000 of shrink. The opposite - when a store has _more_ inventory than is recorded - is rare, but it does happen, usually as a result of merchandise not being received correctly. That’s called “swell”. Your airport ground crews’ use of “turn” is similar to the retail use - the process of an item being received, priced, shelved, then sold. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/99 "2021-02-19T03:24:23Z")
I would have thought that shrink was minimal these days with computerized inventory and item scanning at the point of sale. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2021, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865/100 "2021-02-19T04:01:01Z")
Nope. Still plenty of room for good old-fashioned human fuckups. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-have-a-different-meaning-in-your-profession-than-generally/932865.md?page=6)