The word list: precise words, loaded words, and chat glyphs
This chapter is a dictionary of the words engineers reach for (or should): the precision vocabulary for praising and criticizing work, the discussion words that structure arguments, the AI-era additions, and the chat glyphs (o/, /s, s/x/y/) that carry meaning nobody ever explains. Every entry has an example; the tone column flags the ones that bite.
Words for praising work
| Word | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| concise | Says everything needed, efficiently | "The doc is admirably concise: two pages, full picture." |
| succinct | Compressed and complete | "A succinct summary; nothing missing." |
| thorough | Covers everything, nothing skipped | "Thorough review; you even caught the migration edge case." |
| rigorous | Methodologically careful | "A rigorous benchmark: warmed up, isolated, repeated." |
| elegant | Simple in a way that feels inevitable | "The retry-as-idempotence trick is genuinely elegant." |
| clean | Free of clutter and hacks | "Clean separation between parsing and validation." |
| idiomatic | Written the way the language community writes it | "Very idiomatic Go; channels where channels belong." |
| pragmatic | Chooses practicality over purity | "A pragmatic call: worse on paper, shippable this week." |
| sound | Logically or structurally solid | "The approach is sound; the estimate is optimistic." |
| sensible | Reasonable, defensible | "Sensible defaults throughout." |
| feasible / viable | Possible / possible and worth doing | "Feasible, yes. Viable at our team size, not sure." |
| compelling | Persuasive enough to move a decision | "The cost numbers are the compelling part." |
| legitimate | Valid, well-founded (of concerns, uses, asks) | "That's a legitimate concern, not paranoia; let's design for it." |
| plausible | Believable, not yet verified | "A plausible root cause; needs confirming in the logs." |
| robust / resilient | Survives bad inputs / recovers from failures | "Robust to malformed events; resilient to a full AZ loss." |
| performant | Fast/efficient (informal but universal in tech) | "Perfectly performant at our scale." |
| ergonomic | Pleasant for the human using it | "The new CLI flags are much more ergonomic." |
Don't be confused: concise, succinct, and terse all mean "short", and only two are compliments. Concise and succinct praise efficiency with completeness. Terse is short to the point of coldness: "his terse 'fine' ended the thread." Laconic is terse with style; curt is terse and rude. Calling someone's email "terse" is a criticism dressed as a measurement, so pick deliberately.
Words for criticizing work, calibrated
Ordered roughly by force. The right column is the check before using it.
| Word | Meaning | Force / caution |
|---|---|---|
| suboptimal | Worse than achievable | Mild, polite, slightly clinical |
| questionable / dubious | Doubtful on inspection | Mild; invites discussion |
| convoluted | Needlessly complicated to follow | Medium; pair with the specific tangle |
| opaque | Hard to see through or debug | Medium |
| redundant | Duplicates something | Mild, factual |
| error-prone | Invites mistakes by design | Medium; give the example |
| brittle / fragile | Breaks under small changes | Medium; standard engineering usage |
| hacky | Expedient, sidesteps the right way | Medium-casual; fine self-applied ("a hacky bridge until Q3") |
| janky / clunky | Low-quality feel, awkward | Casual; chat register only |
| kludge (noun) | An inelegant workaround | Casual-affectionate; often self-applied |
| overengineered | More machinery than the problem merits | Medium; expect pushback |
| egregious | Outstandingly bad among its kind | Strong; keep for the genuinely extreme case |
| blatant | Obvious and unconcealed (of a violation) | Strong; accuses intent, be sure |
| unacceptable | Cannot be allowed to stand | Very strong; a line-in-the-sand word, spend rarely |
| abhorrent | Morally repugnant | Maximal disgust register. For ethics violations, not designs; "this design is abhorrent" is a register error, and Chapter 5 exists because of it |
The pattern from Chapter 5 and Chapter 11 governs this whole table: any of these words plus evidence is a critique; alone, each is just a mood. "Brittle: the last three refactors each broke it in a new place" earns its adjective.
Discussion and logic words
| Word | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| orthogonal | Independent; can be decided separately | "Naming is orthogonal to the storage question; let's split them." |
| tangential | Related but off the main line | "Interesting but tangential; parking it." |
| moot | No longer mattering, overtaken by events | "The cache debate is moot; the vendor deprecated the API." |
| pedantic | Precise past the point of usefulness | "At the risk of being pedantic: it's p99, not max." |
| nuanced | Containing important fine distinctions | "The real answer is nuanced; chat won't do it justice." |
| caveat | An attached warning or condition | "One caveat: numbers are from staging." |
| anecdotal | From unsystematic observation | "Anecdotally, cold starts feel worse since Tuesday." |
| empirical | From measurement, not theory | "Empirically, the limit is ~900 rps." |
| canonical | The single authoritative version | "The wiki page is canonical; the README is stale." |
| deterministic | Same inputs, same result, always | "Make the test deterministic before debugging it." |
| trivial / non-trivial | Effortless / genuinely hard (math-flavored) | "The fix is trivial; the migration is non-trivial." Careful: calling someone else's problem trivial lands badly. |
| pathological | Worst-case, adversarially bad | "A pathological input: one giant line, no delimiters." |
| degenerate | A collapsed or trivial case of the general thing | "With one shard it degenerates to a plain queue." |
| edge case / corner case | Boundary situation / intersection of two boundaries | "Empty cart is an edge case; empty cart plus expired session is a corner case." |
| heuristic | A good-enough rule, not a guarantee | "It's a heuristic; it will misfire and that's priced in." |
| ambiguous | Readable more than one way | "The spec is ambiguous about ordering; we should pin it." |
| granular | Finely subdivided | "We need more granular permissions than admin/not-admin." |
| ad hoc | Improvised for this case, unsystematic | "Ad hoc scripts got us here; time for a real pipeline." |
| de facto | True in practice, whatever the docs say | "It's the de facto standard; everyone imports it." |
| verbatim | Word for word | "Paste the error verbatim, not a paraphrase." |
| boilerplate | Necessary repetitive filler code/text | "Ninety lines, ten of substance, the rest boilerplate." |
| contentious | Likely to cause disagreement | "Monorepo vs polyrepo is contentious here; tread lightly." |
| consensus | General agreement (not unanimity) | "Rough consensus: option A, with two registered concerns." |
The AI-era additions
Words that moved from research papers into standup within the last few years:
- hallucination: an AI model stating fabricated facts fluently: "the
model hallucinated a
batchDeleteendpoint that doesn't exist." The standard verb is hallucinate; "confidently wrong" is the colloquial cousin. - grounding: tying model output to real sources: "ground the answers in the docs index and cite the passage."
- context window: how much the model can consider at once: "the diff doesn't fit in the context window; chunk it."
- prompt injection: malicious instructions smuggled into model input: "treat scraped pages as untrusted; classic prompt-injection surface."
- human-in-the-loop: a person gates the consequential step: "drafts are automated, sends are human-in-the-loop."
- eval: a measured test suite for model behavior: "no prompt changes without an eval run."
- agentic: systems where the model takes multi-step actions: "the agentic flow retries with a different tool on failure."
- slop: (informal, derogatory) low-effort AI-generated content: "close the PR; it's unreviewed slop."
Chat glyphs and micro-conventions
The wordless layer of engineering chat. Most of these come from IRC and early internet culture and are still everywhere:
| Glyph | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| o/ | A wave: hello (a head and a raised arm) | Common as a whole greeting message; you may also see \o (waving with the other arm), and two people greeting with o/ \o as a high-five |
| \o/ | Both arms up: victory, celebration | "Deploy's green \o/" |
| o7 | A salute | Respect or signing off duty; gaming-origin |
| ^ / ^^ / "^ this" | "See the message above" / "I agree with the above" | "^ what Sam said" endorses it |
| +1 / -1 | Agree, support / oppose | See Chapter 12; "+100" and "big +1" are emphatic |
| /s | The preceding was sarcasm | Sarcasm does not survive text; this is the standard antidote. /j = joking |
| s/x/y/ | "Replace x with y in what I just wrote" | sed syntax as self-correction: "meet at 3 s/3/4/" means 4. Beloved; explain it once to non-engineers |
| EDIT: | Amendment to an earlier message | Keeps the record honest where editing would hide it |
| nvm | Never mind, disregard | "nvm, found it" is the classic self-answer |
| wfm | Works for me | Agreement on scheduling or a proposal |
| sgtm | Sounds good to me | Sibling of LGTM for plans instead of code |
| ftfy | Fixed that for you | Playful correction; friendly between peers, smug toward strangers |
| TIL | Today I learned | Sharing a discovery: "TIL our S3 buckets are versioned" |
| ELI5 | Explain like I'm five | Requests a from-zero explanation; self-deprecating, fine to use |
| IANAL | I am not a lawyer | Prefixes amateur legal takes; generalized: "IANA security person, but..." |
| PEBKAC / RTFM / lmgtfy | (Insults: user error / read the manual / sarcastic search link) | Recognize them; avoid aiming them at people. Each one punches down |
| ping / pong | "Responding?" / "Present" | "ping @sam re: #4132"; re-ping and bump (Chapter 3) for follow-ups |
| brb / afk / gtg | Be right back / away from keyboard / got to go | Presence markers, casual |
| 👀 / ✅ / 👍 / 🚢 | Looking at it / done / acknowledged / ship it | Reaction-emoji protocol from Chapter 1; 🚢 or :shipit: blesses a merge |
Growing your own list
Three closing habits. First, harvest locally: every team has twenty more of these, and two weeks of reading your own channels with a notes file beats any book chapter. Second, before adopting a word, check which column it lives in here (or ask; "is 'janky' too casual for the RFC?" is a perfectly good question). Third, remember Chapter 13's de-inflation rule: the plain word wins whenever it does the same work. This list is for precision, not ornament.
👉 Single words are half the vocabulary; the other half is two-word verbs. English at work runs on phrasal verbs (spin up, roll back, dig into, pile up) and call-idioms ("you're breaking up"), and they are the hardest part of the language for non-native speakers because the meanings refuse to be guessed from the parts. On to Chapter 15.