Today I’m going to be talking about the viability of full ZBLL. Is CFOP or ZZ CT the future of cubing?
I stated in my first blog that this is what a sentence would look like if I wrote a blog about cubing for cubers. In the eyes of a non-cuber it might as well be in a different language. In fact in any niche hobby there is always a set of jargon developed and understood only by that community.
What does this mean as far as the accessibility of the hobby? How does slang contribute to the understanding gap that exists between the general public and the cubing community?
Let’s take a look at a few examples to find out:
PB
Most people would probably say, “Where’s the J?” But we’re not talking about a sandwich today.
PBs and PRs in cubing stand for personal best and personal record, both representing the fastest time a cuber has ever gotten out an in an official competition respectively.
NRs and CRs
Most people would probably be familiar with the WR. You can read all about WRs in a pretty famous book.
I’m sure looking at a Guinness Book of World records makes getting a WR seem a bit easy given the enormous number of seemingly random categories. Surely in such a niche hobby there is ample opportunity for WRs, right? Sadly no. The World Cube Association has 18 events, and all of them have been optimized in official competition to a degree that requires considerable skill to actually break a WR.
Instead of only recognizing the world record holders, the WCA also decided to recognize those for their achievements in their respective countries and continents. Thus the CR and NR was born.
The area where this starts to get confusing, even for some newer cubers, are the expansions of these categories. Rarely do we say somebody got a CR, we say NAR (usually cubers say “nar” and not “N-A-R”), or North America record. Of course there are Oceanic records and Asian records, and records for every other continent.
Curiously we don’t split up NR any further. Maybe because USR sounds too close to USSR…
If you’re interested in learning more terms, my friend J-Perm made an excellent video on terms cubers should know.
Strange acronyms aside, why does it all matter?
The jargon associated with cubing developed in the first place out of convenience. There’s no need to clarify a long term if both people in the conversation know what each other is talking about. Thus in a community short hand talk develops over time through such conversations.
Of course this leaves out those without the base knowledge to decipher what the jargon means, which returns us back to the idea of understanding boundaries.
Slang or jargon is just another way in which niche hobbies like cubing walls itself off from the general public. Now there’s no issue with this, but we should just be careful to not make it so inaccessible as to drive away possible new cubers. Videos like J-perm’s above are excellent resources for the community to help bridge this gap.
If we want to continue to grow cubing we have to make the language of cubing accessible to the general public.
Leave a Reply