Adventures in Interdisciplinary Short-Circuitry

My position here in short-circuitry of disciplines can be interesting. That is to say, I straddle a few disciplines -- as is so common here at SIMS -- such as law, science and policy, and I often have to translate, in the strangest senses.

Recently, I was collaborating via email with research scientist and an attorney I know via email. We gave the research scientist a bunch of data and analysis and he responded via email with simply:

ACK.

The attorney took this to mean "ack!" -- as in "Ack pffft!", an expression of surprised disgust. I had to quickly explain the geeky version of this -- that is, the ACKnowledge response to a ping or other type of affirmative network response protocol. The attorney was definitely perplexed...