Jargon, Buzzwords, and Technobabble

[mikemarotta]

Being new to microscopy, though not without some general background from common science education, one of the challenges to learning here is tracklng down plain English meanings for all of the unnecessary abbreviations, acronyms, and shorthand.

Having studied the sociology of science at university, I understand several motives for this.

• First, every area of human action has its own vocabulary and practitioners learn to speak that language. That is necessary and proper.

• Second, writing is a chore. It is harder than speaking. We misspell far more often than we misspeak. So, many people want to get it over with as quickly and easily as possible. They want to avoid the pain of writing.

• Third, using the language of the group proves that you are a proper, bona fide, and vetted member of the group. Speaking the local dialect makes you a member of the community. It also excludes outsiders, alienating those who do not belong, thus protecting the community from invasion.

• Fourth we have a human process whereby languages fractionate into dialects that become languages of their own. Latin became Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, etc., only slowly but eventually they lost their mutual comprehension.

I work as a technical writer. In addition, I also write and edit feature articles for print and electronic periodicals. Personally, I love writing. It is fun, not a chore. More to the point here, I deeply learned and always practice the habit of never using an abbreviation or acronym without defining it the first time. Nonetheless, some of those are common, such as USA and NASA. On the other hand, seemingly common terms such as FOV for "field of view" are not found outside of some special areas of applied optics such as microscopy, astronomy, and photography,

FOV is used very often and usually is easy enough to understand from context. On the other hand, I was motivated to write this because I had to stop reading a Beginner post to look up NA for Numerical Aperture. In fact, NA is a misnomer. It is redundant, like saying "robin bird." All apertures in all practices of applied optics are always expressed as some kind of number. Across microscopy, astronomy, and photography, the aperture is the diameter of the objective lens, these days most often given in millimeters and decimal fractions, but also sometimes still expressed in English units of inches and common fractions. In microscopy, NA has come to have a special definition of its own: the sine of the half-angle of the field of view. If I used that term with that meaning in astronomy, it would only sow confusion.

All words are symbols, analogies to objects and processes and those objects and processes must first be perceived to be understood. What is a penguin? It is a large bird that does not fly but that walks well on its legs and lives in the Antarctic region. Wow! Do you mean to tell me that ostriches live at the South Pole? How did they get there? Did they swim? No, ostriches do not swim, but penguins do swim, as well as fish in fact because they are adapted to the water. Fish-birds? A chimera? Are there fish that fly? Well, yes, there are flying fish, so-called. In my mind's eye, I imagine flocks of ostrich-fish flying to and from the Antarctic.

Now, apply that to microscopy.

This is a hobby. We are all learners. One practice that we all learned in school over the years and decades was to take good notes during lecture. Why? It is not just to be able to refer back to the words of the teacher, instructor, or professor. It is because the action of writing puts the knowledge into your brain and therefore into your mind by an active method. When you write, you integrate your knowledge. When you rely on patrois, pidgin, cant, slang, jargon, creole, and buzzwords without objective definitions -- and note the special meaning of "objective" that has nothing to do with lenses -- you disable your own learning processes.

Best Regards,
Mike M.

[apochronaut]

N.A. is so common in microscopy that people that have been around microscopes for even a few years use it as a common form and common acronym. I guarantee you, that you will adopt it in the very near future, as you embrace aspects of microscopy that you now do not know exist. It is even marked that way right on objective barrels and is an industry standard acronym in practice. You might equate it to the practice of putting a snowflake on the side of winter tires. What does that mean? Those tires might be radials by the way or radial ply pneumatic tires, a much less commonly used but technically more easily understood phrase.
Jargon is nasty for sure, just listen to trucker language where a pickle park is a bathroom, where they pay the water bill !! To those coming in from the outside and within a rational context, it becomes necessary to communicate. However , abbreviations emerge over time inside and outside of a technical context and that just happens as a way of communicating too. That's just the nature of language. My aged dog is a sighthound and has gotten very deaf. He no longer hears me well when I ask if he wants something or wants to do something, so I have evolved a series of gestures to replace words. Abbreviations if you will. Pointing, walking fingers in the air and just a sweeping arm motion all speak volumes to him now as he relates to the future events that they describe.
I wish you great success and fulfilled wonder as you discover the infinity of the space of the micro-world. Bon voyage.

[Scarodactyl]

In fact, NA is a misnomer. It is redundant, like saying "robin bird."

"Aperture" without elaboration would be assumed to refer to the f-number of a lens, so different terminology was called for. To use your own example, in some contexts unelaborated "robin" could mean a late great comedian or a sidekick, and if you were in a field where more than one could be meant then you would need to say something like "robin bird."

More generally, I think there's something a bit wrongheaded about sliding into a field that you're not experienced in and scolding everyone that they're doing things wrong.

[BramHuntingNematodes]

NA is nothing, try figuring equivalent focus.

[Tom Jones]

Wow.

[Hobbyst46]

NA has come to have a special definition of its own: the sine of the half-angle of the field of view.

In fact, NA is the sine of the half-angle times the refractive index (RI). That is siginificant: the RI is often not 1.000.
The NA is a time-honored and well accepted term of optics in general.
IMHO, on the other hand, is in my humble opinion a very useful abbreviation, sometimes even more useful than NASA...

[Phill Brown]

Hardware.
The physical part of the hobby that attracts dust and such.
Learning how to deal with physical contamination is valuable.
It gets easier to separate the personal value from the cost but not a step that can be excluded from the journey, or maybe I missed the point?

[GOYA551]

It is unclear to me the point of the original post. Perhaps the original poster (OP for those internet forum savvy) could clarify. But, in the meantime, a point of contention. Describing penguins as "walking well" is basically inaccurate. They walk rather poorly. They do swim well, however.