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<blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9330446" data-attributes="member: 6671663">It’s time for a story about&nbsp; by my father. For those who haven’t run into these before, Dad would have been Caltech class of 1944 except for World War II. He flew photo-reconnaissance P-38 over Eastern Europe, and came home to be part of the class of ‘46. (“I once got within 5 miles of Berlin on a day of exceptionally heavy cloud cover. 5 miles straight up, that is.”) he went on to work at JPL, designing ranging systems for the Deep Space Network. Which is to say that Oboy are my brothers and I second-generation nerds. One time Dad and I were talking about jargon that made its way into regular speech. This was before Neuromancer, and I don’t remember what example I had in mind, but it sent Dad off on a tangent about authors with too-favorite words. In particular, he remembered from his reading as a boy E.E. Smith’s fascination with making everything mechanical be an “integrating” version of itself. He told me that in flight school, he and the other sf readers started referring to integrating goniometers. And he wouldn’t tell me what a goniometer is - I had to go look it up. You know those mechanical-compass-like calipers that craftspeople use? To help them draw angles precisely? Those are goniometers. Goodness only knows what an integrating one would do. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Autumnal, post: 9330446, member: 6671663"] It’s time for a story about by my father. For those who haven’t run into these before, Dad would have been Caltech class of 1944 except for World War II. He flew photo-reconnaissance P-38 over Eastern Europe, and came home to be part of the class of ‘46. (“I once got within 5 miles of Berlin on a day of exceptionally heavy cloud cover. 5 miles straight up, that is.”) he went on to work at JPL, designing ranging systems for the Deep Space Network. Which is to say that Oboy are my brothers and I second-generation nerds. One time Dad and I were talking about jargon that made its way into regular speech. This was before Neuromancer, and I don’t remember what example I had in mind, but it sent Dad off on a tangent about authors with too-favorite words. In particular, he remembered from his reading as a boy E.E. Smith’s fascination with making everything mechanical be an “integrating” version of itself. He told me that in flight school, he and the other sf readers started referring to integrating goniometers. And he wouldn’t tell me what a goniometer is - I had to go look it up. You know those mechanical-compass-like calipers that craftspeople use? To help them draw angles precisely? Those are goniometers. Goodness only knows what an integrating one would do. :) [/QUOTE]

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