I'm going to go defrag my desk area.

A simple, succinct sentence that expresses the idea that I am going to reorganize or clean my desk area with the intention of speeding up access to important and oft-used papers and things. Of course, the utterance of the phrase caught the other two people in the room by surprise. After some humor and jeering for my nerdiness, I ambled off noting that they both understood exactly what I was saying.

This is not an uncommon occurrence here at school. I discuss with my roommate about classifying games through the most efficient way we both know: set theory. There's the set of all games, then proper subsets PC and Console, then subsets of those. We try to define in a mathematical sense the requirements for set membership, etc. It's a tone and language of discussion most people find unnerving.

However, I feel it is important to use lingo and slang among friends and colleagues who (and this is important) understand the lingo. Our entire language system is based on simplifications like this. Who goes out and says "I would like to obtain and consume one pile of beef, lettuce, salsa, various sundry vegetables as appropriate for local customs all wrapped in a thin, flat piece of starchy foodstuff"? We simply reduce this complex sentence into "I want a burrito".

We define new words and phrases for the indescribable, or the otherwise hard-to-describe, events, feelings, things, or ideas we wish to communicate. Every language has them, so why can't we as technical people use our own mutually-understood terms to describe something? Is it really that bad to be 'nerdy' about it, especially if it's a more effective means of communication?