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.
Why not - many ‘academies’ (colleges, universities) are just corporations anyway - different products and processes but are set up as and act as commercial corporations just the same.
And that definition sheds absolutely zero light on what Scrum actually is, to boot. It is almost masterful in its zen-like definition of nothing at all.
But watching one makes me calm and forget about the world for a while, while watching the other makes me stressed and depressed.
Another one I helped launch at a particular food manufacturer was Object Oriented. They freaking loved the sound of their own voices saying that one and killed it beyond recognition.
Really surprised no one posted this yet.
But I think some of the examples of garbage language are equally useful. “Pain point” and “stakeholder” seem like perfectly good words/phrases to me. If I didn’t say “stakeholder meeting” I’d say, “meeting with people who are affected by the policy.” I’d still have to say what I wanted to say.
I think maybe the synthesis here is that it’s hard to tell garbage language from useful phrases in the heat of the moment (the author makes reference to an ingenuity to bullshit ratio that probably is in reference to this).
I think it is. There really is something to this. Like I said above I do think that some of these jargon terms really mean something. If nothing else they are shorthand for something that would otherwise take more words to explain. But other examples in the piece are good. “Parallel path” meaning “make” is a case where clearly the language has gone wrong and turned to crap.
I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to corporate culture, but I do think there’s a real thing being discussed here, and I also think the author is doing some good grasping towards understanding the function of this language.
I paused to think about this because I think I’ve had someone use the word “stack” to me to basically mean “task list” (“what’s on your stack?” “can you put this on your stack?”) and I laughed because of the implication that I do my task list first-in, first-out. But then I thought about it some more, and I guess I basically do.
The Cloud = “Someone else’s computer”. I sort of wish more people knew that.
I think that’s because you don’t understand the birds. I can only imagine how stressed the birds are trying to make exactly the right noise to get a mate.
The phrase that absolutely killed me was “results oriented”. Among my friends it was a pejorative phrase to describe people who plays games badly. That is, if you hit on 18, the dealer turns up a 3 and you say, “See, hitting on 18 was the right play!” then you are results oriented. The part that really hurt was that I felt it was being used to mean basically the exact same thing, but the people I worked with thought that was good.
One problem is that many people cargo-cult the jargon of effective people/groups.
See what I did there? “Cargo-cult” is a jargon term which either communicated a fairly complex idea succinctly, or was totally meaningless to you. If you know the jargon, then you probably get my point and move on.
If you don’t know the jargon, there are a few different possible takeaways:
Because it means that people like me are obsolete, for one, because “history” isn’t marketable. And of course, that’s possibly being shown to me to be true… after I have not jumped on the latest fads and marketed the shit out of myself by competing with other historians to be clever and click-baitable on social media, much to my professional detriment, I’m sure.
I mean, I suppose I could be an entirely useless person who wasted their life because I decided to do something that doesn’t fatten some assholes bottom line… but you know… maybe I’d like to think that we can have a world where literally every little thing needs to be part of the endless pursuit of wealth and power. Maybe I’m just naive, tho.
I fully believe that some things can not be made into a business for profit. Education is one of them, because the social gains are not just about who gets rich quick, it’s about the creation of citizens and human beings.
I think ultimately people just hate the jargon of environments they hate. We hate the fact that we spend so much time talking about sending emails asking for money, or telling a new hire what the office rules are, or having a certain kind of business meeting that we develop abbreviated or stylized terms about those things.
Not because developing abbreviations is hateful and boring, but because those things are hateful and boring. Nobody cares! Why can’t we all just acknowledge that we’re doing things that nobody cares about - not even us!
I agree with you in terms of hearing jargon you don’t know the meaning of. But if garbage language is a thing (and I think it is) then you wouldn’t be able to identify it in jargon you didn’t know. You’d have to know and understand the jargon better than most of the people who use it to sort out the garbage from the useful.
But also, I do think that making a “cargo cult” out of jargon is potentially a way that garbage language gets adopted. In your three ways to respond, the second one is the “cargo cult” option and it seems like it’s a road to nonsense.
I’m not entirely sold. I recently read a paper on a “relationship anarchy” “unconference”. I’m very interested in what the relationship anarchists have to say, but some of the jargon drives me nuts, not the least of which is “unconference” (which I’ve heard from other progressive groups as well - like the act of conferring with other people is a colonial idea that needs to be destroyed).
Sometimes the point of jargon is to convey discipline-specific ideas between people who are assumed to already be familiar with them. That has the unfortunate side effect of excluding people who aren’t already familiar with the term. But there seem to be many settings out there where those two things have been reversed: the point is to exclude outsiders and conveying ideas has become secondary. That’s jargon I hate.
I thought it was baked in?
Like everything else in academia, garbage language is a form of gate keeping. Why do art and literature majors have to take advanced math, like calculus or statistics? Because it screens out the weak, and passes the strong. Jump through the hoop, or drop out.
Garbage language among academics is the same as advanced math for art majors. You make it or you don’t, and if you don’t, we don’t want you anyway. Eh, that is to say, “Academic dialogue is intended for those faculty and administrators who are both highly educated and learnéd in the topic at hand, thereby contributing to the conversation in a meaningful way. There are of course options for those unable to contribute to the dialogue at hand.”
A lot of these seem like a mix of inflated egos, corporate speak, and laziness. I grew up in the South, everything has a saying or jargon associated with it. One from my dad, “Boy, you’re so lazy you couldn’t pull a greasy string out of a cat’s ass.” I realize that’s more a saying, but I’m undecided if it’s any worse than synergize…
At my work it is death by a million acronyms, only the suck ups use corporate speak.
Garbage language in a corporate environment? Pffft I’m still asea over the redefinition of the word “literally” and don’t get me started an the At Attacks, as in “Where did you leave your car at?”
Yes. I’m aware. thanks for telling me what I already know.
I’m also aware how people use such language in order to sound smarter and more erudite than they actually are.
You make it or you don’t
This is laughable on it’s face. I’ve seen plenty of incredibly talented and brilliant people not make it, not because their work wasn’t good enough, but for other reasons (they weren’t willing to suck up, to play the game, to move across country every 2 years, etc, etc, etc, into infinity). Academia is not and has never been a metritocracy. It’s a crap shoot, and those who are lucky enough to be born into a privileged position, to be able to abandon everything else to their career, and who happen to know just the right people succeed.
Let’s not start that up. Mark Twain used “literally” as an intensifier in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. It is the destiny of all adverbs to eventually be intensifiers.
Why isn’t cop language mentioned as objectionable?
When 2 drunk people (sorry, "intoxicated") get into a fight (sorry, "altercation"), causing some police to go ("proceed") to the bar ("location") and shoot ("discharge their weapon") at one of those people (now, "offenders").
Once upon a time, I was selected to present my paper titled “A Synergistic Theory of Communication” at a Mass Communications Conference. 
