Is it just me, or is anyone else reminded of the story of Project Xanadu? (A great read[1], if you have an hour to spare.)
Especially this part:
> Shapiro also discovered that the group had been working together so long it had developed a kind of private slang. It took months to comprehend what the programmers were talking about. Most of them were book lovers and trivia mongers who enjoyed developing a metaphor based on obscure sources and extending it via even more unlikely combinations. For instance, the object in the Xanadu system that resembled a file was called a bert, after Bertrand Russell. With files called bert, there had to be something called an ernie, and so in the Xanadu publishing system, an ernie was the unit of information for which users would be billed. To understand the details of Xanadu, Shapiro had to learn not only the names for things, but also the history of how those names had come to be.
Especially this part: > Shapiro also discovered that the group had been working together so long it had developed a kind of private slang. It took months to comprehend what the programmers were talking about. Most of them were book lovers and trivia mongers who enjoyed developing a metaphor based on obscure sources and extending it via even more unlikely combinations. For instance, the object in the Xanadu system that resembled a file was called a bert, after Bertrand Russell. With files called bert, there had to be something called an ernie, and so in the Xanadu publishing system, an ernie was the unit of information for which users would be billed. To understand the details of Xanadu, Shapiro had to learn not only the names for things, but also the history of how those names had come to be.
[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html