Context, jargon, and clipping

From an article in Details magazine for April 2013, p. 64, a quote given here without context:

“The house doesn’t even have a complete back. We had to be careful about the budget and determined that we could add the top of the roof in post.”

Add … in post is baffling without the context. Things get a bit clearer when I tell you that the house in question is the ominous Victorian house next to the motel on the set of the new A&E tv series Bates Motel (a prequel to the movie Psycho), and the speaker is Mark Freeborn, the production designer for the series. But that gets you only part of the way; you also have to work out that post is a clipping of post-production in the jargon of filmmaking and video production. And of course you need to know what post-production refers to as a technical term in this world.

The holiday ball

It could just be a card from one baseball fan to another, one of those topical greetings that the card companies specialize it:

But in fact it’s from my New York Times carrier to me (a gentle Christmas Money solicitation, a different sort of specialized message — with the text “Joy & Peace / Hoping we will bring you better news this Holiday Season!”), and it’s not (intentionally) tailored to my interests at  all. What makes it comprehensible is the context, here the geographical context: the carrier and the NYT subscribers are all in the San Francisco Bay Area, scene of the San Francisco Giants win in the World Series this fall. For the moment, then, we are all Giants fans.