Word of the Day: coacervate
So my buddy is in China. Normally he is someplace much less exotic but this summer he decided that the family togetherness activity should be “live in China for two months.”
This isn’t actually as bizarre as it might sound. Each year our company has us set, well, personal growth goals might be an appropriate description. We have a portion of our yearly bonus tied to these … things. (I HAET the word “goal.”) Anyroad, my buddy decided a couple of years back that he was going to learn Mandarin Chinese, as he was going to be in charge of one of our development teams in Beijing. He did quite well, actually. On his trips over there he was able to hold his own in the little markets and managed to purchase interesting snacks like fried scorpion (yes, on purpose; he says they taste kind of like popcorn. We share this love of funky food, btw.) His wife even got on board and started learning Chinese as well.
To cut to the chase, they decided to take the whole family (four boys ranging from about eight to 17, and known collectively as The Busters), rent an apartment in Beijing, and live there for two months. He will spend the week in the office, more or less, and they will spend weekends (and some evenings, I’m sure) exploring bits of China and havening [sic] what, IMO, could be best described as “a blast.”
Wait, I still haven’t gotten to the point of this post. I mentioned he’s kind of in charge of one of the software development teams in our Beijing office, right? Well, not so much for the project we’re on, but he is one of our senior developers and well versed in some of the more important “good engineering practices.” So one of his primary tasks, while in Beijing, is to train our coworkers there in some of the techniques we’ve been learning here. Mostly it’s stuff we’ve been (slowly) learning from Ye’ Olde Skool of Harde Knocks, but we’ve had some formalized training (read “paid good money for”) in things like design patterns, test-driven development, Qualities, the importance of automated testing, and a whole bunch of other things.
[When is he going to get to the point?!]
One of the Qualities of good software design is proper use of cohesion and coupling — that is individual chunks should be highly cohesive (all the little bits should be highly related to each other and do exactly one primary thing), but have low coupling (the chunk should not require extensive knowledge of other chunks, and the chunks they do use should be easily replaceable with other similar chunks). He was trying to explain these concepts, in English and broken Chinese, to his Chinese co-workers — who, coincidentally, speak excellent Chinese, but speak levels of English ranging from “broken” to “conversational.” Many were unfamiliar with the English term cohesion so he asked one of the senior Chinese developers for the proper Chinese word used to convey this software engineering concept. Everyone seemed to be more comfortable with the concept after that.
Not to be left out, however, my buddy had to know the etymology for the Chinese word (for cohesion) and how it translated back to English. The Chinese-English dictionary software he was using provided him with the word coacervate.
I quote from dictionary.com:
co·ac·er·vate – [n. koh-as-er-vit, -veyt, koh-uh-sur-vit; v. koh-as-er-veyt, koh-uh-sur-veyt] noun, verb, -vat·ed, -vat·ing.]
–noun
- Physical Chemistry. a reversible aggregation of liquid particles in an emulsion.
Pretty wild, eh? How about this one:
co·ac·er·vate (k-sr-vt)
n.
- A cluster of molecules.
- A cluster of droplets separated out of a lyophilic colloid.
and one more:
Main Entry: co·ac·er·vate
Pronunciation: kO-'as-&r-"vAt
Function: noun
: an aggregate of colloidal droplets held together by electrostatic attractive forces
But personally I like the definition my brother graciously volunteered when I informed him via IM that coacervate was the word for the day:
definition: a soothing cocoa based bromide
So there you have it. Coacervate is a whole bunch of things kind of like cohesion … or possibly something soothing involving the same stuff from which chocolate is made.
Which one will you remember? 
Tags: China, clive, havening, word of the day