Do You Speak Cooking?

So I was reading Al's Morning Meeting again this morning; Mr. Al linked off to a Washington Post article about cookbook publishers having to rework their recipes for an increasingly cooking-illiterate culture.

There's a little sidebar quiz too (non-interactive, but still good) -- do you know what it means to blanch vegetables, cream butter and sugar, dredge chicken, fold egg whites, and simmer stuff?

Cooking is just like any other specialty, in that it has a specific vocabulary that you really should know before you get started to get the maximum benefit from it. (Oh noes, not learning! What about my instant gratification?)

Computers, sports, dance, driving, sewing, filmmaking, shooting, fishing, painting, surgery, music -- when you get down to it, pretty much everything worth doing (and lots of things that aren't) ends up developing its own specialized language so you can express essential but complex concepts quickly and easily. This saves time, wears less on the tongue, and lets you get to the more interesting stuff.

This can be kind of irritating if you don't speak the language, so people who aren't fans of overly-complex jargon may also have a point: Sometimes jargon develops to help distinguish members of the tribe from outsiders. If you know what a Brown Coat is, you're of the Firefly tribe; if you roll on dubs, you're probably... well, you're probably a lot younger than I am. (See also: Teen Slang).

As with anything, you have to strike a balance between efficiency in language to accessibilty and ease of use by others -- personally, I'm a fan of explaining the concept the first time you use it, then going forward from there.

I slip sometimes, of course -- when you've been doing something for a long time, it's easy to forget that things that are second-nature to you (like, FTP) may be completely foreign concepts to someone who's getting started.

Switching topics, the Al's article also had a link to a multimedia representation of coalition casualties in Iraq which was kind of sobering.

Thanks -- Joe