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Zygology
Original blog post
2012/07/30
11:37am
Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
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Zygology? That's the study of joining or fastening. This is part of a complete episode.

2012/07/31
12:02am
Ron Draney
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This seems as good a place as any to put out a public request for what may well be a coined term.

When I was teaching programming, I found that a lot of old-timers had difficulty with pointers. To explain in non-technical terms, a pointer is a place where a programs stores not a desired piece of data, but the place where that piece of data can be found. It's an important concept to understand because pointers can be used in ways that regular data can't: you can save a pointer in two places, use one of those to change the value of the data item to which it points, and now both pointers refer to the changed value (doing this without pointers requires changing the value of both targets, with the risk that someone else will retrieve and use the old value before you get the second copy changed).

Anyway, the vocabulary quest: to label the people who can't grasp the idea, I need a name for the fear of indirect reference. Some kind of -phobia, I'm sure, but I can't dig up a suitable Greek root. Maybe something to do with a pointing finger?

2012/07/31
6:44am
Robert
Posts: 190
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+1

dys·dex·i·a  

n.
A learning disorder marked by impairment of the ability to recognize and comprehend indices or indexing.

[New Latin : dys- + Middle English, index .]

dysdexiac n
dysdectic adj & n
dysdexic  adj

Ron, if you get something in the way of 'royalty,' be sure to send some my way.
2012/08/01
10:17am
Glenn
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indirectile dysfunction?

2012/08/01
12:04pm
EmmettRedd
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Ron Draney said

…Anyway, the vocabulary quest: to label the people who can't grasp the idea, I need a name for the fear of indirect reference.

My research partner (who started with programming a PDP-8) suggested that a good term for the fear of indirect reference would be "common sense". :-)

2012/08/02
9:14am
Bob Bridges
USA
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Aneuthuphobia, maybe?  The adverb εὐθύς means "immediately", and as an adjective it means "straight" (or, metaphorically, "upright").  It's the only thing that occurs to me with a few minutes' thought.