Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/24/what-is-garbage-language-a.html
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What I find to be problematic with academic jargon is when it indeed does more obfuscation than it does revelation. Sometimes jargon can be good and helpful, but not always.
Also, corporate-speak is creeping into many places now, including academia… It’s depressing.
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And those less adept are at a disadvantage in parsing when it’s one or the other, making it especially frustrating for those wanting to learn.
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Yes, sure. Annoying I guess… but isn’t this how all language works? The author’s opening paragraph has phrases like “my gap year,” “went freelance,” “microwave it for 90 seconds,” etc. These are all relatively modern constructions that sound completely normal and fine to her but would possibly be considered bizarre to some readers from a not-so-distant past. She even uses “weather event” later on. I don’t know that she occupies any particular castle of linguistic purity from which to cast stones.
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My paradigm has totally shifted.
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Wow, you felt it too?
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Reminds me of when I tried to figure out what “Scrum” was. Scrum is, of course:
a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value…Scrum is Lightweight, Simple to understand, Difficult to master…
And you, too, can become a certified Professional Scrum Master for only a few thousand dollars. Now don’t you feel silly that you already spent a few thousand to become a Six Sigma Blackbelt? That’s so last century!
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So my school got it wrong?
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i believe the term “garbage language” is, in itself, garbage.
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These feel different though. I can’t think of a clearer, more straightforward way to say either “went freelance” or “microwave it”, and “gap year” is self explanatory from the context.
“it forced her to embed in a landscape” might qualify, however.
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Prolific Microsoft developer and blogger Raymond Chen has a whole series of blog postings on the kind of jargon used at Microsoft:
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What a fun blog.
If you wanted to know whether it was okay to discuss the top secret projects with Alice, you would ask whether Alice was in the tent .
This phrase in the tent had some catchiness to it, so people started applying it to any case where there was a top secret project. And since all cool words get verbed eventually, the term in the tent led to the verb tented .
Some years later, I learned that the concept of being “in the tent” is recursive: There are tents inside tents! Even though you are tented for some project X, there may be a part of that project that is double-top-secret, and you need to be tented for that part of the project to know about it.
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We gotten use to it.
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I wonder if they had ordinary tents in mind; or if they picked that one up from some sort of Fed work.
Those guys take their security tents seriously. (vendor for example only; there are a surprisingly number of options. Even more if you want something containerized.)
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“I can’t think of a clearer, more straightforward way to say either “went freelance” or “microwave it””
My point exactly. They are perfectly fine constructions NOW, but there was a time not so long ago when a certain type of pundit would have word-raged about using “microwave” as a verb when it was clearly a noun. “You put something in a microwave,” they might say, while lamenting the decline of civilization and demeaning with strenuous acidity those who adapted to the new usage. It seems to be the way of the world.
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Scrum, IMHO, is a giant festering pox on the software industry. The jargon is part of why it is awful, and the zombified true believers who spout the jargon, and the fact that it is basically a sped-up production line for tech.
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Gotta synergize the eschatology… or something. 
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