Idea Germ:

I have recently become fascinated with the specialized language used in each profession or situation. Handsome Dan is a great example. Another is Crime Central. I was watching CSI with Abby and they used 'crime central' to mean a specific situation. Now, the word crime and the word central don't trip me up individually. But collectively, they mean something different. I am not talking about difficult or unintelligible language such as is used by doctors and lawyers. That's the biggest bunch of habius corpus. I am talking about word groups that have been assigned meaning to help out a profession communicate in our otherwise weak language.

Some examples in my profession. Spaghetti Code. Technical Refresh. Boolean Drill. Kludge. One of these if 'jargon'. Can you guess which one? But the others are easily identifiable as possessing the characteristics of that which fascinates me. I have started paying attention to people who say, "...we call that X." The 'we call it' identifier in any conversation signifies the approaching word group that has been reassigned meaning. These are fascinating to me – at least the ones that are foreign to me. The ones I know and use...not so much.