I had a rather geeky experience in my Intro to Fiction class today.
I asked the professor a question regarding the behavior of one of the story's characters. The professor explained the motivations of that character, and then proceeded to outline the series of events in the story brought about by those motivations and those of another character. He made note of the fact that the story's conflict was a result of these motivations being acted upon so soon after each other that neither character had awareness of the other's intent.
Upon hearing this, I referred to the occurrence of those events as
a race condition. As one might expect, the meaning associated with the somewhat obscure computer science term was missed by the English professor, so I subsequently rephrased my understanding without the use of technical jargon.
The term's use, though, was not lost on another engineering student present in the class. As I had found out in the prior session of this class, one of the students who was in my Probability with Engineering Applications class last semester recently enrolled in the same Intro to Fiction section that I was in this semester. I doubt that this will be the only time that student will be humored by my random use of technical language in that class.
(...Would you look at that, I finally posted something here!)