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posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 17 2017, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the speak-regular-words dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 17 2017, @02:20PM (4 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 17 2017, @02:20PM (#495255) Journal

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 17 2017, @03:04PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday April 17 2017, @03:04PM (#495273)

    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)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 17 2017, @04:52PM (#495332) Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:48AM (#496117)

        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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:00PM (#495797)

      "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!"