I’ve spent some time in the past making fun of buzzwords. After having spent a little over seven months in a more corporate environment, my attitude is beginning to change.
Certainly, there are buzzwords. By accepted definition, “buzzwords” are nearly meaningless, and are used simply because they are the concept du jour and sound exciting, impressive, and meaningful.
The problem is, meaning can be relative. Long ago I wrote a post about the “scalable enterprise solutions” which was a broadside at the overuse of those terms to describe almost any company’s particular product. Now, however, I’m seeing that the reason these terms began to be used is that they had a concrete, valid meaning for many who began using them in the first place. There are corporations for whom scalable is an essential quality of whatever software or systems are being deployed; it isn’t simply a “buzzword” in these cases. It’s an ingredient that must be there, or the deal’s off.
Other words, like “enterprise,” can seem like buzzwords, but in practice are often simply used as informational shorthand. The way enterprise is used generally means something like pertaining to very large systems or organizations, and embodying specific criteria of stability, security, and flexibility. For a large corporation, this is the sort of systems and processes which are needed; why should they want to use long phrases like that when if they simply say enterprise, everyone will know what they mean?
Sure, when words are used simply as marketing fluff, or are overused ad nauseum (”paradigm” comes to mind — although it is actually quite a succinct term with a specific meaning which ought to be a useful term) — this is usually what bothers folks about “buzzwords” in the first place. Rightly so, perhaps.
But as jargon, such terms will never leave; they begin as information shorthand or conceptual abbreviations. As such, they will always be useful to some people. Just because they get hijacked as the “term of the month” for awhile doesn’t make them all irrelevant — who wants to say “will keep working if/when the number of clients or connections is drastically increased” when you could just say “scalable”?
All that being said, the Action Item comic strip linked at the top is still darn funny.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I have long argues that jargon *in itself* is not bad, it is, as you say, information shorthand - a way of saying something more simply. The problem occurs when you use jargon outwith the context of a community within which the jargon is a recognisable communication.
Computer geeks shouldn’t talk about ‘NIC’s with their next door neighbour, they should talk about network cards. (Or, better still, talk about football instead ;) )
The other problem is when people who *don’t* understand the jargon insist on using it anyway.