👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little squiggle – "…-.” (…—.!) We affectionately call that a hyphen, and when you see a thing like that smack-dab in the middle of a word, we say that word is...
multilang
.
Now, before you immediately conjure up visions of fancy foreign flags and multilingual spies, let me clarify! Multilang basically means, in really official, slightly pretentious nerd-speak: having to deal with a whole bunch of different darned languages simultaneously. 🤯. It's the equivalent of trying to herd cats while simultaneously translating Klingonese into Elizabethan English for a very grumpy badger. Seriously. Think about it! Imagine a customer service systems architect who needs to simultaneously debug text input across dozens, maybe hundreds, of distinct alphabets, each with wildly varying quirks and unspoken rules. They are, quite frankly, living on the edge of sanity. 60/40 split on that badger, I tell ya! The origin is honestly pretty bleak. Initially it was a little-used systems acronym for "Many Linguistic Aggregations - Therefore Likely to Cause Insufficient Personnel and Prolonged Headache." (…Okay, maybe we made that last bit up. It sounds right, doesn't it?!) — Here’s an unsettling example sentence using the term, just because I feel like it: "The algorithm flagged the entire repatriation of
