I've only been working with the person about 6 weeks. I didn't think too much about it at first, though it did seem odd and unhelpful. It's only in the past couple of weeks that I've started to find it irritating, and yes, offensive. I will probably bring it up to the lead at some point.

By the way, I double-checked my assertion that he doesn't use words, in case there were some documents I forgot or had missed. Nope. At best, his diagrams or screenshots will have captions. Those captions remind me of the sort of useless comments we've all become conditioned to ignore.

    x = y + z; // set x to the sum of y and z