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Comment by mbrock

One thing is to learn not to fear jargon. It's just a bunch of made up words, and you can quite easily learn them, and then you will sound just as clever and sophisticated as those people you saw in discussions.

Like, you might be getting into woodworking and see someone casually saying this, a real example I ran into earlier today:

"I built a jig to hold my boards down and run them over the stacked dado with the miter guide. Despite this, the cupping that some of the boards had made the cross cuts uneven. I opted for half lap joints because I've seen people do miter joints on this bed design before and they don't seem to hold up very well over time."

That's actually a self-proclaimed beginner talking about one of his first woodworking projects. When someone asked him how he learned all these words, he said "You can learn a lot from YouTube."

Indeed those concepts aren't advanced; a miter guide is just little gizmo that holds your plank at an angle, a half lap joint is just a particular way of gluing two planks together, etc.

But reading stuff that has unfamiliar vocabulary can be tiring, so keep an eye on that and make sure you look up the words you don't understand, maybe keeping a small lexicon in a text file.

parent mbrock 7 years ago

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