The Dilletante's Dictionary is a handy dictionary of music tech terms, from A-DAM to Zero Crossing. It was written by Sandy Lerner, who founded Cisco Systems, then sold her share for $125million in 1990, before founding Urban Decay cosmetics, collecting a 6,000 book library of women's writing and giving vast amounts of money to animal charities.
In the introduction, she says that the dictionary was written in Scotland in 1996, when she got into sound recording: "I was entering my third score of life and it was time for a career change; I do this every twenty years whether I need to or not. A dictionary appealed as it’s one thing to peruse the technical journals, but another to actually understand them. Having done the go-learn-everything- about-the-new-career- so-I-don’t-look-like- a-total-idiot thing before, I knew that the hardest thing to do is explain something you don’t really understand to someone else."
Posted by Tom Whitwell. 
