Unnaturally Long Attention Span

In the course of working with fellow geeks, I've noticed a few language usages that are unique to us geeks. One of these is the tendency to classify problems and issues as either "trivial" or "hard". Now, you have to understand, part of this standard geek colloquialism comes from the math tradition of formal proofs. Trivial is used to describe the obvious, non-interesting solution. "Hardness" could be a shortening of NP-hard, used to describe a class of problems that requires a lot of computation.

Next time you are tempted to use these labels, maybe consider some of the following more meaningful alternatives:

Instead of "This such-and-such problem is trivial"... consider replacing it with:

• This such-and-such problem is easy to solve!
• This such-and-such problem is small in scope.
  
• This such-and-such problem is easy to talk about, but would require a team of grad students 10 months to implement.

Instead of "So, we all know such-and-such is hard"... consider replacing it with:

• So, we all know such-and-such is computationally intensive.
• So, we all know such-and-such is impenetrable.
• So, we all know such-and-such is something I have no idea how to do.