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> What if "emacs" was a smear in Portuguese, or "vim" was an unspeakable slur in India?

You can even get this kind of problem without involving a different language, because words can have different meaning in different fields.

There is a (probably) urban legend about a mathematics grad student working in algebraic geometry returning from a conference, who finds he is sharing the security line at the airport with another conference attendee and they start chatting about algebraic geometry, talking about "blowing up points on a plane". It does not go over well with the non-mathematicians in line or with the TSA agents.

Efim Zelmanov, a noted algebraist, tells of being stopped by the KGB on the way to a conference and being questioned at length because he had books with him about "free groups" and "radicals".




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