[wnissen]

The whole concept of "SuperSpeed" made it more difficult to understand what was going on, so I'm very glad to see it go. A rare hiccup in the USB consortium's otherwise unbroken streak of making each generation more difficult to understand.

The all-time prize has to go to the German wine producers, though, who regard a wine named "2001 Selbach-Oster Wehlener Sonnenheur Riesling Spaetlese Feinherb" as very precise and helpful.

[DocTomoe]

> 2001 Selbach-Oster Wehlener Sonnenheur Riesling Spaetlese Feinherb

It is a dry (feinherb) white (Riesling is a white wine berry variety) wine that has been harvested late in the season (Spätlese), making it have a higher alcohol level. Wehlener Sonnenheur is a geographical vineyard location (should probably read Wehlener Sonnenuhr, which is semi-famous and located at the Mosel, near Bernkastel), Selbach-Oster is the name of the winemaker, and 2001 is the year of production.

I fail to see what is complicated about that. But then I am German.

[vitus]

Most of those characteristics actually seem par for the course even in the US. For instance, Trader Joe's sells an in-house "Trader Joe's Reserve Merlot Sonoma Valley 2020" [0].

At a bare minimum, you'll get vintage (year), winemaker, and grape varietal, possibly with some additional qualifiers, e.g. Reserve as above, or late-harvest. Riesling in particular is such a widely used grape that can be either dry or sweet, so breaking out "dry Riesling" is not atypical.

[0] https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/reserve-merlot-...

[wnissen]

Oops, thanks for the correction. I let my poor French bleed into my poor German. I have even stayed in Wehlen at the Gasthaus Prüm so it's especially embarrassing.

I think your point is relevant to USB, though! The USB folks know what all the words mean. They know what a USB 3.4 Gen 2 cable is, and what a PD cable is, and what a SuperSpeed cable is. Because they are the experts. It's not complicated to them, just as the wine description is, truly, not complicated to you. But your average person who just wants to connect their monitor to their laptop is left adrift.

P.S. that wine (well, the fruchtig version, not the feinherb) is one of my very favorites.

[loufe]

I suppose the OP wasn't being sarcastic, despite (I agree) it reading as such.

[dividedbyzero]

I think that's fine, every word carries actual information, though not speaking German will render the last two words useless and not being well versed in German wines will do the same to a few words at the start, so perhaps the only universally understood tokens are 2001 and Riesling (and perhaps not even Riesling?)

However, there are lots of laws called things like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and I don't know which level of German language proficiency you need to be able to read that fluently, but probably one of the higher ones. Even native speakers sometimes struggle with lengthy concatenations and I feel that German legalese is a whole different level of crazy. So perhaps the crown for the most opaque naming scheme should go to the German Bundestag?

[hnbad]

That compound word is obviously never used in conversation so I don't think proficiency factors into it. I doubt it's frequently spelled out, even in legalese. This is no different from how Americans use catchy acronyms for new laws so they don't have to spell them out in full (PATRIOT Act being a more blatant backronym example).

[DocTomoe]

>That compound word is obviously never used in conversation so I don't think proficiency factors into it.

It is in discussions about how the duties on surveilling the labelling beef on packaging are distributed (which is what this law was about). The official abbreviation was RflEttÜAÜG ...