"J. P. Gilliver (John)"  wrote

| I'm sorry, but the above is why this sort of discussion never ends. When
| someone is intimately familiar with the syntax of a language, the
| meaning/functioning of a line like the above - or, say, in C, something
| like *a++=b(&c--) - _is_ obvious; to anyone else, it is far from so. And
| the person to whom it _is_ second nature sees no point in explaining it
| with a comment, either: (a) it just _does_ seem so obvious to them, (b)
| they'd actually find it difficult _to_ explain, in much the same way as
| describing the mechanics of walking isn't easy, even though most of us
| can do it. (Forgetting it took us some _years_ to learn!)

   You're generous to ascribe honest intentions. It's
usually just a case of swagger: "I dare you to grovel
and ask me what this means." People do it. Officials
do it. Trades do it. Just look at the tech world,
"leveraging solutions across the enterprise". Their
jargon is gibberish to everyone else but they think
they sound technical.

   My favorite example is "micturate". Medical doctors
like to use obscure words to sound authoritative. So
when the general public got used to "urinate" they had
to switch to micturate to make sure people wouldn't
know what they were talking about. I'm waiting for
penis and vagina to get overused to the point that
they sound like swears and can no longer be used in
polite company. (It's getting close to that time, I think.)
Somehow the experts will cook up somethnig more
obscure, probably derived from Greek, so that doctors
and TV commentators can talk about sex in an offical
capacity.

|  *a++=b(&c--)

Get out of town!

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