So…“jargon”?
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No thanks, I’ll wait for the BoingBoingStore to offer 20,000 hours of Scrum Training for $20
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And yet, a dozen years on, the synergies that come from vertical integration still sound absurd.
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He really is a great writer and there’s something for everyone. There are highly technical posts dense with with code, Microsoft history lessons, fun anecdotes, questionable bug reports, and random posts about such varied topics as the Seattle Symphony, or linguistics.
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The kind of jargon one finds in journals like Theoretical Criticism of Critical Theory1… stuff right downstream from PoMo and post-structuralism… what the texts do primarily is serve as a justification for perpetuating the author’s paycheck. That said, there are some quite intentionally opaque authors who’s work lands and does more than recapitulate the paycheck-making ritual. Thinking of Spivak and “Can the Subaltern Speak,” and the way her demands recapitulate trying genuinely to understand people who (1) are likely quite different than an academic, or an academic’s audience, and (2) have a history of being unheard, unrepresented in their own words, but (3) are deployed as moral signifiers in conversations that they may not participate in because they have nothing like the power of entry. That paper has had consequences, and changed others’ actions.
1 Not an actual journal. Tip o’ the nib to Alison Bechdel.
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Read the whole thing, and there were a couple good quotes in there. Disclaimer- machinist, but with a degree in Japanese language.
“Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time, not what one wants to, but what one can?”
Very true. I often lament this fact.
I also like the paraphrasing of “your ratio of ingenuity to bullshit is tipping too far in the wrong direction”
I need to use that on someone.
One thing I don’t miss about the world of white collar work is people speaking directly to you like this and sounding incredibly full of egotistical bullshit.
My first thought when someone speaks like this is I immediately think someone else controls their salary and they’re trying to obfuscate their worthlessness and lack of intelligence
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I read that as “want something catheterized.” I’d better go to bed.
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A large part of my job is asking people, “What does that mean? Why did you do that? When did you do that? How did you do that? Okay, what does that mean?” and so on, to get to basic facts.
Q: What is “X?”
A: Well, you know, it’s X.
Q: But what is it?
A: You don’t know what X is??
Q: Pretend like I’ve never heard of X and tell me what it is. [Then describe, explain, etc.].
One of the great joys of taking depositions is the opportunity to look ignorant without shame. 
In the same vein, I’m not convinced that I really understand something unless I can explain it to an average 10-year-old.
Re: the fact that plain, concise explanations can take more effort, here’s an interesting investigation of that, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” quote often attributed to Twain:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
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jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine.
Your fake garbage language is dumb stupid garbage, you square corporate drone normies! And that’s totally different from the way that people use language in professions I like.
I believe the jargon term among linguistics scholars for this approach to language is “garbage sociolinguistics.”
The author doesn’t hate corporate “garbage language”; she hates corporate culture. And okay, fair enough. That’s more defensible than, say, hating African-Americans or young people—but people who want to attack those groups make the exact same arguments about AAVE or whatever new slang term might be catching on at middle schools. It’s gibberish, it’s the language of deception and shiftiness, it reflects the inherent dishonesty or silliness of the people who use it, it’s all a smokescreen to keep us normal people at arm’s length, yadda yadda yadda.
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What may be a deeper aspect of this problem is that a lot of the annoying terms have been stripped of meaning.
Many of these have been hijacked from specialists who used them to communicate importantly novel ideas. Take the way that “Stack” is now used in the business world - the term comes out of a specific structure in low level code operations on a microprocessor, it gradually diffused into usage in general software lingo (possibly due to professional proximity), even here it still carried a degree of technical specificity wrt to a nested hierarchy of structures (note this is totally different than what it meant in microcode, but context would indicate correct interpretation). From there it gets picked up by managers and whoever else finds it useful (eta) to refer to “any random grouping of things” (as we do with terms), and so the originating highly defined meaning gets lost.
The authors example of parallel path originally referred to a product development strategy of pursuing multiple ideas concurrently in an A/B comparative fashion, sometimes having separate teams compete. In social sciences virtue signaling got haphazardly misappropriated by internet goons. And I’m pretty sure Cloud drifted lazily into popular parlance due to a quirk of how “servers outside the local network” can be represented in some popular graphical office communication slide show tools, (i.e. visio and powerpoint).
Language evolves, but apparently it also erodes.
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Language is a disease, and we are all infested vermin that spread it
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This is so very true. My wife has at times taken Masters level courses as part of her continuing education as a teacher, and some of the literary theory courses are filled with the most mind-numbingly obtuse terminology. It’s as though having studied the works in order to reveal their innermost complexities to the world, they then want to hide their thoughts in the deepest pile of bovine colonic excretions they can create. You have to be a literary theorist in order to understand literary theory.
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As someone else said, there’s a difference between corporate specific garbage speak, and words/phrases that have trickled into general usage. Microwave is a good example. It’s a word that describes a device that does exactly what the word says. People buy them and use them at home and work. It’s not garbage language. Garbage language would replace the already easily understood word “Microwave” with some sort of corporate gibberish.
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to stop by the break room and fusillade my lunch.”
“The way we fusilladed that client, am I right?”
“Demonstrabatably, overgranter. I’ll reambulate the postulate in ten segments.”
Or garbage language would take the word Microwave and poorly apply it to an unrelated concept. “Take this report and microwave it. Don’t send it back until you have.”
You won’t know what it means unless you work at that company. Someone might leave and take the reused word elsewhere so it spreads. But it’s not a usage the general populace knows or cares about. It’s meaningless outside of it’s limited space. Mostly its gibberish designed to make everyone working feel like they’re doing something important, when really their just killing time until their commute home.
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I got tired of explaining that The Cloud was a idiotic term beaing used by people with “tech know how envy” and was merely the graphic you describe but I guess that ship has sailed.
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I have been the genesis of this phenomenon a few times. Building software for a startup I use some technical term in a meeting with the execs, am stopped to explain, and then keep hearing them, and eventually the whole company using it. One such case was SME Subject Matter Expert. I’m sure that at that company the word Expert is never used. It is a way of sounding “in the know” I guess.
I sometimes wonder if it would be excessively petty to create a Visio add-in that has no immediately visible effect; but swaps out all instances of the default ‘cloud’ stencil for a hideously beige whitebox tower with “Someone Else’s Computer” scrawled on it whenever the user exports, shares, etc. so that the recipient gets the message.
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The tragic thing about “subject matter expert” is that it actually has a meaning; and it’s an important one (though usually trivially obvious in context except to certain Dunning-Kruger cases) so having it turned into a pompous synonym for ‘expert’ isn’t just nonsense to nonsense, guff to guff; but an actual meaning chunk getting hollowed out and having its skin worn as a grotesque flesh-mask.
You don’t normally need to use it, since context heavily implies it; but there are plenty of situations where you have lots of experts of various flavors on hand and noting that one is, or isn’t, an expert on the particular facet of the matter at hand is essential to getting a good outcome.
Misusing “subject matter expert” is, at best, pompous; and at worst an implicit statement that ‘experts’ are normally fungible so it is actually notable that a given situation makes the correct sort of expert worth mentioning.
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Yeppers. We have subject matter experts on our helpdesk, none of whom is an expert in the subject matter they’re listed as being expert in. They’re simply a little more knowledgeable about those processes than other helpdesk folks. The real experts are the ones they call when they need help. I absolutely railed at this designation when I was on the helpdesk and refused to acknowledge my supposed expertise when called. “Yes, I’m the SME, but that just means I know who to call when the shit hits the fan, I honestly don’t know jack or shit about the topic.”
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And ‘jargon’ has two meanings…
The first meaning, from mediaeval French, meant the twittering of birds: little feathered things making complicating sounds to mark and defend territory, impress the opposite sex, and deter rivals.
The second meaning is for technical or management speak: little white-coated or suited things making complicating sounds to mark and defend territory, impress the opposite sex, and deter rivals.
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