Brian White on Linguistic Nimbility

Brian White, one of the Program Managers for Team Foundation Server (specifically, the work item tracking piece of Visual Studio Team System), blogs about acronyms at Microsoft and the sources of project code names.

Linguistic Nimbility

The day I loose my linguistic nimbility will be the day I leave the software industry. You might ask what is linguistic nimbility? or LN for short. Well, linguistic nimbility consists off two skills. First, is the ability to determining the meaning of something given a short series of capital letters. Second, is the ability to understand what someone is referring two when the name for the thing has changed 3 or 4 times over the last 6 months.

He thinks names like Currituck (named after a lighthouse in North Carolina) should be banned. He probably won't like the one I assigned to a project I started working on recently, Mukilteo (more on that later).