Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Most of us tailor our language to our audience. We choose different words when talking to our child than when talking to our spouse, our pastor or our boss. We may not even notice that we are doing it. It's often automatic and unintentional.
At work, knowingly or not, people choose words for specific purposes beyond just conveying an idea. They want to impress, show deference, take credit, look smart, intimidate, dominate or avoid blame. They want to cover up their own incompetence or avoid managerial scrutiny.
Unfortunately, they often employ communications strategies that backfire by distracting from the message and subtext they want to convey and instead placing focus on the language and the speaker. This can make them seem pompous or condescending, caricatures to be mocked rather than professionals to be admired.
Here are a few of the ways people undermine their own credibility.
You verb a noun or adjective by using it as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech. Instead of offering people incentives, you incent them. Instead of giving a gift, you gift them. You upskill yourself instead of learning something new. You workshop ideas, calendar meetings and architect systems.
[...] You jargon your communications by using terms of your trade when speaking to people who are unlikely to fully understand their meaning. Instead of using normal English, you use unknown words or phrases, transforming your ideas into gibberish in the minds of your audience. IT folks have a particularly bad reputation for jargoning our stakeholders to death. We tell them that we will form an agile team, use a mesh network or a NoSQL database, without any explanation.
[...] Acronyming is a lot like jargoning but uses abbreviations that your audience is unlikely to know. "Hi. I'm John from the PMO and you've been assigned as our project SME. We've already decided to use a SaaS model for our IoT product to maximize the ROI." As with jargon, acronyms appear distancing and disrespectful.
We all know what clichéing is: employing overused phases to convey common ideas. "I know we're going to be late, but every cloud has a silver lining." "We're going to avoid that technology like the plague." "I'd fit really well into your team because I'm a jack-of-all-trades, people person."
Clichés may convey the ideas you are trying to communicate, but they also create negative impressions of you. Cliché spouters appear to be inarticulate and imprecise. When someone uses a cliché to explain something to me, I assume that he is using vague generalities because he either doesn't understand or wants to avoid the specifics of the situation at hand. He seems incompetent or secretive.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @11:51AM (3 children)
Relevant: Buzzword Bingo [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday April 17 2017, @12:11PM (1 child)
If used on purpose, it can be an extremely effective tactic - see BOFH [theregister.co.uk] for brilliant examples (true, sometimes the most effective tactics can fail, better have other means - like heavy objects and certain windows - handy for when you need them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @03:30PM
Windows 10?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Monday April 17 2017, @03:10PM
With sentences like:
IT folks have a particularly bad reputation for jargoning our stakeholders to death.
it's clear that the person who wrote the original article is actually part of the problem. There's so much wrong packed into that one sentence that it would take about two paragraphs to describe it all.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 17 2017, @01:19PM (4 children)
You jargon your communications by using terms of your trade when speaking to people who are unlikely to fully understand their meaning.
That's not very analog and realistic. Decades ago I worked at a telco and I knew all the EE details of T1 line coding being AMI or B8ZS. Still remember most of it, its not terribly complicated modulation. I could show you an oscilloscope trace or explain it in detail and its error conditions and we could ponder the miracle of bit regenerating repeater designs and how the modulation is self clocked and all kinds of nifty T1 stuff all day long.
The important point is for the other 99% of the employees at the telco, "full understanding" was totally unnecessary. The lower level techs need to know the option exists, its important, and to configure to match both sides of a piece of wire. Slightly smarter techs had to understand how to use different test patterns on a test set to verify configuration. Slightly smarter techs knew the pins on a 8-pin jack for a T1 were... 1,2 and 4,5 whereas a single digital channel was 1,2 and 7,8 and probably 50% of jacks installed by non-telco emploees were therefore miswired. Sales droids had to know enough to ask the customer what their equipment required, enter it correctly on the order, thats all they needed to know. So the level varied a bit from role to role but almost never involved "full" except for a couple folks in engineering.
An eon later I was doing BGP work for an ISP at the same desk (typical dilbertian telco experience) and its the same thing. I can talk RFCs all day about AS numbers and which one wins in a tie condition in the big list of BGP route selection criteria, but for most of the employees all that mattered was not completely Fing up the order and not selling the customer something stupid (like a full BGP feed on a 56K circuit... or promising them they can keep their previous providers /27 worth of address space, LOL)
How about legacy voice circuits per VOIP? How many E+M signalling options existed? I can't even enumerate a full list, much less all their states and weird interoperability (or lack thereof). I remember having a bellcore handbook of circuit diagrams for loopstart groundstart and like 10 forms of E+M signalling. "Glare" related problems used to be a huge pain in the bad old days. Anyway this is another example where a voice services engineer could likely troubleshoot a signalling problem using a multimeter but the level of knowledge required to avoid having to troubleshoot using a multimeter is just having a drop down on a form (on a 3270 terminal in the pre-internet era) and selecting the matching signalling.
Knowing an option exists and its important to get it to match is perhaps 99% of the battle for 99% of employees.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday April 17 2017, @08:34PM (3 children)
What is E+M signalling btw?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 17 2017, @09:12PM (2 children)
ear and mouth. The fundamental mystery of 70s-00s era T1 signalling was creating what amounts to a protocol to quickly mark voice trunks as off-hook in service while not colliding and having side A try to call out at the same time as side B tries to call out.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:11AM (1 child)
Only now, at the end, do I understand why VLM is a Nazi: he was there with the Telcos, back in the day. The movie, "The President's Analyst", starring James Coburn, lays it out quite well.
Did you ever notice that in every country, everyone hates the phone company?
This would be enough to make almost anyone, who had no education or morality, become a Nazi. Poor VLM. We shall mourn his passing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:40PM
We're the phone company; we don't care. Couldn't resist that line, LOL.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 17 2017, @01:36PM (6 children)
Jargon is always a means of inducing confusion in your listeners. This is not infrequently done on purpose, to make your audience feel stupid for not understanding you.
That does not, of course, make it good for actually communicating your ideas. But that's not the point of it, the point is to try to make yourself look smarter than you really are.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday April 17 2017, @02:04PM
Sometimes jargon is needed to discuss specialized things without confusion.
But yes: the use of jargon for the sake of jargon removes, rather than adds, clarity.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 17 2017, @02:20PM (4 children)
One person's jargon is another person's normal language.
Imagine that you'd record an everyday talk of today about something internet or computer related, and then played it to someone from twenty years ago. How much would that person understand from it? Even if that person was introduced to current technologies (but not to the corresponding jargon) before playing that recording, I'd bet not much.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 17 2017, @03:04PM (3 children)
From 1997? There's a good chance I could reasonably explain it: The world wide web was in its infancy, and some of the key technologies were already starting to be in use.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday April 17 2017, @04:52PM (1 child)
Please re-read my comment. Carefully.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:48AM
I'm from 20 years ago (well, technically 20.8). I believe I'll be able to understand the recording. Send me the link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:00PM
"kek. I sent a snap of me and my bff in an uber, and some dbag sent me a twitter dm asking if we were dtf!"
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Ken_g6 on Monday April 17 2017, @02:13PM
The next article on Soylent News this morning says:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 17 2017, @02:19PM (5 children)
It's profoundly ironic that someone who claims technical language ("jargon") is unnecessary ends up using some inaccurately:
You verb a noun or adjective by using it as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech.
"Verbing" is linguistics jargon. And by the way, it's common in English and has been done for centuries. Nevertheless, NEW or unusual instances of verbing can be problematic.
OK, let's see your examples:
Instead of offering people incentives, you incent them.
Does anyone actually say "incent"? That sounds like something George W. Bush would say instead of "incentivize"... oh wait, George W. Bush DID use that [texasmonthly.com].
Oh, and that's NOT "verbing." Verbing (as generally understood) is actually using a noun as a verb in a sentence without changing its form, e.g., we table the motion. You might add -ed or -ing to fit the grammatical place, but no other modification like adding or dropping suffixes. That process is generally called verbification [wikipedia.org].
Instead of giving a gift, you gift them.
OK, that's actually verbing. But it's also established usage: people have used "gift" as a verb since the 1500s.
You upskill yourself instead of learning something new.
Uh... "upskill" isn't even a noun, so how is this an example of verbing?
You workshop ideas, calendar meetings and architect systems.
Oh good -- one example of what you're talking about that actually fits the definition of the term you're using AND is a somewhat recent neologism. But that's pretty tame. Does anyone really object to "workshop" in this sense? Does it impede your communication or understanding?
So, the article is ironically an example of poor use of jargon. Instead of just saying that "using [a word] as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech" can be problematic (which would have easily made his point in plain English), he instead unnecessarily defines the word "to verb" and then proceeds to consistently misuse it.
The funny thing, of course, is that the article's title and examples are full of actual verbing: buffooning, jargoning, acronyming, clichéing (which I assume is a deliberate attempt at humor). Too bad the author then shows he doesn't even know what his own terms mean, which threatens to undermine HIS message by confusing his readers.
By the way, I'm all for "plain English" when it's appropriate. At other times, jargon and acronyms are necessary to refer to things by their standard technical names or to draw important technical distinctions. Yes, if you're speaking to an audience who may not be familiar with such terms, you should define them clearly first. But sometimes imprecision in language can be a real problem: if you don't take the time to explain a technical distinction because you want to avoid jargon, your audience may go away with the wrong impression. In cases of management, this could lead to bad decisions resulting from misunderstanding: "I thought you told me we just needed more of X broad (non-jargon) term?" "NO! You convinced the board we need more Z, which barely fits the definition of X; there's a BIG difference between Y and Z, and we actually need Y!"
TFA seems profoundly unfocused too. There are all sorts of ways to improve communication, but I'm having trouble finding the common thread between "jargoning and acronyming" (both potential overuse of technical language) vs. verbing and "clichéing," which generally are understood by your audience (but are part of a much larger class of potential impediments to making your spoken language seem more "polished").
Lastly, I assume this article is intended at a technical audience, since it's in Computerworld? I can understand the focus on jargon and acronyms there. But do tech people generally do a lot of inappropriate verbing or overuse cliches? Those are trends I associate a lot more with business school types.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Farmer Tim on Monday April 17 2017, @03:10PM
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @03:53PM
i love you; i have these arguments at work all the time but i am accused of being an obstacle.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:51AM (2 children)
By the way, I'm all for "plain English" when it's appropriate.
Slight objection: There is no such thing as "plain" English, and secondly, it is never appropriate.
It is only an accident of history that English, or as DeutscheSprackers call it "Anglish Sprache", a rather bizarre dialect of German, became a lingua franca, replacing, with all the intended irony [for those who do not get it, and Runaway1956, "Lingua franca" is Latin for "Common tongue", a language which many different peoples use to communicate with those who do not share their native language.] English has the most irregular forms of any language, no doubt caused the the irregularity of its speakers, and the fact they call their bathrooms "WC"s, how does that suggest the necessaries? And English also has the highest number of idioms of any language, particular turns of phrase that no non-native speaker is likely to ever comprehend. This makes it a very bad choice for a common language, especially on the internets. And then there is spelling! Native speakers, as evidenced every day here on SoylentNews, cannot get English spelling right! The language as absorbed all kinds of words, starting with Gaelic, and then Latin, and Greek, and then Angles and Saxon, and the Jutes (whom everyone always forgets, just saying), Germans, William the Conqueror a Norse guy that spoke French? And then we end up with old English, a bastard language with at least Five Fathers: no wonder the English speakers can have contests on spelling their own words, a thing that is not a matter of skill in most other languages!
But, tl:dr, WTF, man. PBS with the SJW who are LOL about the TMB and the TrumpB. Language evolves. It evolves toward entropy. Soon, there will be a plethora of words, and they will all mean the same thing. Differences between nouns and verbs will be diminished, just as the potentiality between particles an galaxies is dissapated, and nothing is the universe will move toward anything else, as we will be nothing but entropy, the "grey goo". English is the language for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:55AM (1 child)
A "wash closet" is a much better name than a "restroom". Do you have such bad constipation that you fall asleep on the toilet? A lot of people have anxiety using public restrooms so entering and using one is certainly not restful. Wash closet, on the other-hand, implies a small place where you can wash yourself, a far better description if you ask me. Well, tons of people don't wash themselves, so I guess just go with whatever floats your turds away.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:02AM
"Wash Closet"? You aren't British, are you. OK, we will try to cover your crass mistake, like if you had brought a dish rack, instead of the diabolical rack, during the Spanish Inquisition, which no one expects. The proper signification of WC is "water closet", as in, a closet with water in it. I still do not understand how the Brits came up with that, other than the obvious rebuttal (everyone drink!), and your point about rooms in which one would rest is well put, and well taken. But what are we to make of お手洗い? Hand washing? But then there is also 便所, "convenient facilities". God, I love the Japanese language! So much finesse, so much lacunae? And why float them away? Save them up, compost, and put them back on the rice fields they came from, for great victory?
(Score: 2) by ticho on Monday April 17 2017, @02:33PM
IMHO LOL.
(Score: 3, Informative) by YeaWhatevs on Monday April 17 2017, @03:13PM
Obviously it's not a matter of to jargon or not to jargon, but a question of who your audience is and what the intent of your communication is. If you're in a situation where you are trying to raise funds, you better do some research about your audience and get it right. If you're explaining to your coworkers you may not give a flipping burger what they think and you may just want to avoid getting challenged.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Megahard on Monday April 17 2017, @03:36PM
Just wondering...