Engineering English is different

EVERY profession has its own special language or dialect. Sometimes the resemblance of a professional dialect to everyday English seems purely coincidental. It looks like everyday English or sounds like English but the meaning keeps tantalizingly out of reach. The language of professional educators is often heid up as an example, variously called “pedaguese” or “linguaccio.” The language of government bureaus is another — “gobbledygook.” Sometimes the language of engineers is not far behind in its technical use of familiar words like “stress” or “frequency” as well as in its use of highly technical unfamiliar words. So far as I know it doesn´t have a special nickname. But ever since my first teaching job in the College of Architecture and Engineering at the university of Minnesota thirty years ago I have thought of it as the language of “stress-and-strain,” paralleling in some ways the name of a period of German literature — the “Sturm und Drang” or “storm and stress” period. Sometimes I even suspect a kind of Germanic cast in its often un-English sentence structure, which would not be entirely strange when we think of the extent to which German technology and scholarship have contributed to our own. The author of a satirical article on “Broken English” in those playful birthday celebrations honoring Niels Bohr gives a beautiful example: “This is the moment when the frog into the water jumps,´ one of my teachers used to say at the critical spot in a mathematical proof.”¹