More Fun With Languages

I was laughing when I told the guy I dated during my senior year of college that I would need to learn three languages for our relationship to work out long-term, but I really wasn't kidding.

His undergrad major was Computer Science Engineering: my eyes glazed over every time he started talking about his classwork because I didn't understand a word he was saying.  Especially with all the acronyms.  And speaking of acronym hell, he was also in Air Force ROTC--anything relating to the military is incomprehensible to non-military folk as well.  And, to serve as the icing on the cake, he was (and is) half-Mexican: his immediate family all spoke English, but many of the extended relatives spoke only Spanish.

I remember thinking back to this when I first started blogging and everything was a mystery.  How to set up a blog at all, first.  Then, eventually, as I got more ambitious, how to link text, embed images, and add HTML code to my site.  Blogger made most of that easy enough to figure out, but it was an exercise in unfamiliar terminology nonetheless.

I was reminded of it yet again today.  Courtesy of NOLA (whom I still consider a friend even though she added to my obsession list!) I am now trying to figure out geocaching, which has a very steep initial learning curve.  For example, if you see a listing for a "bison in a pine" (or anywhere else), you are looking for a small metal cylinder, often on a keyring.  Figured that one out pretty quickly, but I saw the following sentence in a listing this morning and had absolutely NO idea what it meant.

"To locate the cache you'll need to project a waypoint 223 feet at a bearing of 171 degrees magnetic from the above waypoint."

Somewhat depressing since this one is marked as a relatively easy find, too.  Yet another foreign language...