Sort of, in modern parlance, ‘microwave’ can be a verb meaning ‘to cook using microwaves’, and these days the common meaning of the noun ‘microwave’ means the cooking device. Originally, (and to many scientists still) “microwaves” meant electromagnetic waves with a wavelength of somewhere between a millimetre and tens of centimetres (‘micro’ indicating that they have a smaller wavelength than your average radio wave).
It just so happens that microwaves with approximately a 12cm (~4") wavelength do a really good job of heating up water, and our food is mostly water. The rest of the machine is there to stop the microwaves getting out and heating up all the water in your body (this would be bad).
A good example of jargon crossing over into modern English, and having it’s meaning subtly changed along the way.
There are universities which require some core courses in each of the main divisions (Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Biological Sciences) as a requirement for a bachelor’s degree, but it’s not a universal requirement. Plenty of art or lit majors graduate without calculus or statistics. And when core classes are required, it’s to create a well-rounded education, not to try to make people drop out. Why would a school want the bad publicity that comes with having a high dropout rate?
Probably pretty tough to prove to what extent this is practiced today - by it’s nature it would be somewhat structurally concealed. I’ve definitely gotten the strong impression that it is alive and well.
Why do you think your world is precise enough to require jargon? Think about honoring this diversity by using synonyms and analogies, and by avoiding cliches.
The math department chair at my college has been very vocal – at least when among the other department chairs – in his opinion that gate-keeping is a thing we do and should be doing, and that the math department does intentionally, because not everyone gets to be an astronaut, nor should they.
It sounds like that math dept chair considers his role to be doling out social capital rather than effectively educating. Depressing though not surprising.
(is social capital scarce by definition? surely mathematical knowledge isn’t a theoretically limited resource, (although we did have a programmer at work once who resisted incremental versioning - arguing that we risked running out of numbers …))
I’ve heard it said that Organic Chemistry is the first line of defense against incompetent doctors.
In Mathematics, I would have thought that it’s the department’s job to find out which people are interested in post-nineteeth century math, and which people just need “STATS”, or “three semesters of calculus” or “DiffEQ”.
Pretty much the case. As funding dries up, those at the top are going to be pulling up the ladders of social mobility. And they’ll proclaim themselves to be pragmatist and blameless as academia becomes more and more a means of reinforcing the social order instead of a place for new and exciting ideas.
I have to admit first off that I have not yet read the full piece (though I surely intend to), but I have to say that your examples strike me more as useful evolution of language rather than “garbage” language. Euphemisms and new words can be garbage, but they don’t have to be. Each of your examples is precise and has a clear meaning to a modern speaker, which gives them communicative value and makes them clearly non-garbage. Whereas when somebody asks me to “do a deep dive” on a subject because we really need to “dig in,” well, that tells me nothing. When a consultancy introduces its newest consultant as a “heavy hitter,” I learn nothing about the person (though if they tell me nothing else, I can infer that he/she has probably done nothing of note and is probably not, in fact, whatever “heavy hitter” is meant to convey).
I encountered all of these and more on at least a weekly basis when I was working a lot in Silicon Valley, and it was aggravating because it was rare that anybody was willing to get more specific than “dig in,” but after I dug in I was inevitably missing some of the specific things they wanted to see. I came to see it as a euphemism for “read my mind, and while you do that I’m going to go move some goalposts around.” I most definitely consider that “garbage language” because it utterly fails at the thing language is supposed to do best: communication.
There’s also a grey area (for me, at least) in the middle. For example, when somebody tells me that something is “baked in” to the numbers they’re presenting, I know exactly what they mean, but I still think they sound stupid.
