Comment by logifail 17 hours ago
> Do you know every common programing language?
A long time ago my OH was introduced to someone who claimed "to speak seven languages fluently".
Her response at the time was was "Do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?"
As a native English speaker, I had no idea what OH was either. I’ve seen SO for significant other and not stack overflow, and I’ve seen reference to better half not just other half. By that choice, I am left to assume this person feels they are the better half which says a lot about them.
As a native speaker, you probably scratched your head and worked out what could fit in that gap and eventually worked it out. Then you'll grumble because the other speaker didn't choose your preferred diction.
As a non native speaker you'll probably just feel upset/hopeless/angry.
From my experience, "non-native" here includes people who are "fluent".
So we arrive at the situation where my OH-SO beloved wife is fluent in English and is definitely better than me at writing clearly constructed English essays but when it comes to usage of random idioms/slang or understanding local (and foreign!) English accents I have a very clear advantage.
Paste the comment into an LLM and ask it what it means. Don’t use Google.
OTOH we are one of today's "lucky" 10,000? And future searches will possibly lead to this post, further reducing friction to using this acronym. Also newly trained LLMs will also be able to answer quicker. Yay?
I wonder how acronyms such as OTOH even become so well known that they can be used without fear or not being understood? When is that threshold reached? Is using OH now the beginning of a new well-known acronym? I guess only time will tell...
> OH
Other half? I've never seen this acronym before.
As a foreign English speaker, it's a huge pet peeve is when people use acronyms without having used the full sentence before. Especially when the acronym is already a word or expression and looking it up just returns a bunch of useless examples (oh!). Eventually I'll find out the meaning (other half), and it always turns out they only saved a total of six or seven letters, which can be typed in less than 0.5 seconds, but in exchange they made their sentence more or less incomprehensible for a large group of people.