An online intro-to-proof course provided an unexpected opportunity for a series of email exchanges that yielded insights into one student’s mathematical thinking and the ambiguous role of mathematical jargon in miscuing this student’s reasoning. The jargon deals with the notation , which encapsulates multiple conceptual meanings: the process of taking the limit, the question of if the limit exists, and if the limit exists, its value. As a matter of jargon, the statement was used in context for L to retain these multiple meanings, so L no longer represented merely a value. In computational calculus, this is of no consequence but in a course involving limit proofs, it led to confusion.
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