Horological Meandering

Watch enthusiasts use a lot of shorthand and jargon. We have nicknames for watches that can confuse the uninitiated. I remember referring to a “Speedy” a few years ago and someone asked me what I meant. But we have bumblebee’s, DRSD’s, Volcanos, etc., etc.

How about we try and list ‘unofficial’ terms, abbreviations, etc. we use around here to help the novice – and the rest of us?

Are you up for it, or is it too daunting a task?

Andrew

but I think it would be fun. When I first started in this hobby I had a hard time deciphering all the terms and jargons used by WIS but gradually it all came together. What's more difficult for me is all the local Chinese slangs used to decribe or name a piece. For example, a Daytona would be Day Tor, which is close enough but it literally means a mop in Cantonese, so anybody not in the know would find it strange eg. "when are you getting your mop?" 

I'm sure the Panerai & Rolex guys, which are very popular will be able to enlighten us further, especially with all the vintage jargon, ie. exclamation mark, tropical dial, great white, maxi dial etc. etc.

Hope this brings a lot of replies for our benefit.

cheers

fernando

There are sections within the community (and I guess Rolex stands out, but there are others) that have their own jargon that even the rest of us 'normal' watch aficionados can't keep up with. But it's partly what makes the hobby fun - all the research required to understand the subtleties.

Thanks for the contribution.

Andrew

Hello Andrew,

On top of the fact that it is a daunting task, perhaps some of the apparent lack of interest in engaging in such a project stems from a desire to be somewhat insular (for lack of a better term). Jargon can serve as a protective shield and badge of belonging for social groups with niche interests and taking your time to slog through the various specific meanings can be something of a rite of passage.

I am of course speculating as to the reason for the dearth of participation in this thread so far and not advocating insularity. I'm also not volunteering time towards developing or maintaining a wiki at this time however.

_john

A right of passage for the "inner circle." You have to earn it!

A category of watches/brands that are produced more in limited editions runs then regular production runs, either in reality or perception.

Best,

Horo

... reading this forum visiting their local AD next week and asking to see the new PamRooBang they had read about!



A

For rich / well-to-do less educated Chinese in Malaysia, the widely accepted name due to poor pronunciation for Rolex is - "Lolek"

Regards

Ling

I use a suite of linguistic analysis tools in work for search engine analysis.  If one of the mods can grab a dump of something like six months of text from the forums, zip it up and send it to me, I can run it through the software and produce a list of words, frequency and collocation (which words occur to together most often).  It's then simple to dump it to Excel and slightly tedious to go manually through the list, flagging all the nouns and adjectives that could be added to a glossary.  Or if this isn't possible, and if I can muster the energy , I could run a spider over the site, snaffle all the text and analyse it.

You're not trying to modernize the ancient art of horology are you, Nick?

Your solution sounds very interesting and I would love to see what the software did with the collected posting here.

Andrew

A dial where a straight middle gap between 2 lines of the COSC wordings.

Regards
Tyler

... brand to have generated its own language amongst aficionados.

Thanks for making a start to it, which I appreciate!

Andrew