Language is a quirky thing.  I’m from Texas, so I speak American, Texan, and my six years of classroom Spanish have given me the ability to ask for beer and directions to the bathroom.  I say that I speak American because I’ve been told by all my friends from England that whatever it is we speak is certainly not English.

Over the years I’ve had some pretty funny run-ins with “conversion issues” (if you will) from American to English and from English to American.  One of the funniest comes from my college days when a data structure professor from England was teaching a group of freshman computer science majors about binary trees.  If you have no idea what a binary tree is then you should probably head over to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree to learn a bit more about them or this blog entry isn’t going to make much sense to you.  And if you’re not up for some sophomoric humor, then know that it’s forthcoming and consider yourself duly warned.

He began by discussing the basics of a binary tree and the underlying data structure, which as we know is comprised of a value and two references to other binary tree nodes.  One is called the left node and the other is called the right node for reasons that should be obvious if you look at the picture at the top of this text.  Since this was a C++ class, all of the references were pointer based (a pointer is, in short, a variable that “points” to an object or value), so he referred to them as “Names and Addresses”.  Why he didn’t just refer to it as an “Address” I do not know.  But I digress.

Writing out “Name and Address” on a white board is no small task.  It takes a lot of time and white board space.  So the term was shortened to make it more efficient to write and discuss.  And of course, when you condense Name and Address, naturally you conclude that the appropriate acronym is NAD.  Assuming you are from England.

Consider this my public warning to all of you Brits out there who are curious about what could possibly be wrong with this situation.  NAD apparently has two meanings.  If you are chemist, then you may recognize it as Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, a complex molecule used in glycolysis (thank Wikipedia for that one).   But you would be in the minority.  If you are a college freshman then you probably know it by its far more popular meaning, an American slang term for ... how do I put this gently ... an individual instance of the testicular pair. 

If you have not made the connection, take another good look at the binary tree image at the top of this entry and take note of the anatomical similarities to the aforementioned slang reference.  Also know that the professor’s examples were clearly labeled with “Left NAD” and “Right NAD” and not my euphemisms. 

So the class came alive with questions from all over the room:

• What happens if you only have one NAD?
• Can you have three NADs?
• Should you encapsulate your NADs?
• How do you avoid NAD access violations?
• What do you do when your NAD’s have an overflow error?

I’m not sure if the professor left that day wondering why his classroom was so interested in Binary Trees, or if he left with a smirk on his face knowing exactly what he had done and that his class would never forget Binary Trees for the rest of their lives.  I guess I'll leave that to the philosophers.