When naming variables, cultural context matters more than you think. Some poor French programmer just trying to be descriptive with his data analysis functions - Anal_in , Anal_out , anal_insertion , and the masterpiece Anal_compare - accidentally created the most uncomfortable code review in CS history. Ten years of coding experience and I still can't bring myself to abbreviate "Analysis" in my variable names. Not after The Incident™ of 2011 when our offshore team's perfectly innocent code made the entire San Francisco office spit out their kombucha simultaneously.