from Hacker News

Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?

by aleda145 on 3/21/22, 9:28 AM with 16 comments

• by a1445c8b on 3/21/22, 12:43 PM

  I thought the article was just another one of those low-effort rants about specialist language.

  However, after reading it through, it was really a well-thought-out criticism of filler words (jargon-y and otherwise) that, when subjected to mild questioning, actually meant nothing.

  Great writeup. I enjoyed it.

• by xyzzy21 on 3/21/22, 8:25 PM

  Every industry and every function (marketing, sales, manufacturing) has it's only jargon, slang or lingo.

  Strictly everything in the word clouds has a meaning and its fairly specific. I'll be happy to translate if people think these are junk - they aren't.

  This is the language of marketing. Missing were "market segment", "value proposition", "lead generation", "on-boarding", etc. But these all have particular meanings as much as "pointer", "functor" or "iterator" do in programming.

  Now just as in technical fields, there's a thing known as a newbie who is "buzzword compliant" but not actually understanding jack. Less technical areas (sometimes marketing) will have more people who are buzzword compliant and who get away with never learning beyond that. But strictly you can't last long without "success" and that required grokking such terms effectively.

  Programmers have the same level of jargon and slang as marketing people. And sometimes programmers use the terms without understanding them also.

• by iancmceachern on 3/21/22, 4:19 PM

  I worked at a place where they started writing down the jargon as if they were real words. They even started naming documents these non-words. I worked at another place that had in its quality system a procedure for Data analysis. In the data analysis procedure it said to "trend the data". They meant "perform statistical analysis" but wrote the procedure from the point of view of website metrics or social media post popularity and not from the perspective of a technical or scientific professional doing statistics.

• by escapedmoose on 3/21/22, 6:15 PM

  I think this applies not just to communication, but to framing concepts for your personal understanding as well. I use templates to track and plan work on personal projects, very similar to what I’ve been doing for years at my job. My personal templates were drastically improved the day I decided to strip out all the garbage words I’d learned from work, and replace them with vocabulary that is actually meaningful to me.

• by Tagbert on 3/21/22, 8:36 PM

  It’s pretty common for groups of people to have domain-specific language.

  I’ve done programming on and off for years. Recently I’ve seen the term “closure/clojure” in various places. Context is no help on the meaning. If it matter’s I’ll just have to look it up. Another term that comes up if “Turing complete” and there are large arguments about whether X is turning complete or not. I’m sure that it means something to those using it but it has no meaning to someone who is not in the know.

  I don’t point this out to shame anyone. It’s just a natural process that happens within a specialize knowledge space that needs it’s own terms to define concepts.

• by cutler on 3/21/22, 12:53 PM

  "Deliverables" just makes me wanna puke.

• by coward123 on 3/21/22, 4:28 PM

  Analogy and tribalism are powerful tools. Analogy in the sense that a corporatespeak word can act as an abbreviation for a concept and thus the ability to get a group to the same mental space. A common language smooths communication and creates alliance. Thus, while it may outwardly seem hokey and painful, there really are understandable reasons for this linguistic evolution.

  The hard part is when you leave that environment, say via retirement. People who have been embedded in Corporate America take a few years to detox. Some don't ever really make it out.

• by 4oo4 on 3/21/22, 2:06 PM

  At what point do we consider this its own dialect of English?

• by zcw100 on 3/21/22, 5:23 PM

  Posting this just never gets old...

    > It must have been a couple of months because...
    >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of 
    >> months or so
    >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
  

  I'll quote the relevant section, "He is oblivious to the fact that the Sociopaths use Powertalk as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the Clueless and communicate with each other."

• by zubairq on 3/21/22, 3:22 PM

  "Look guys, we gotta be smart about this" is one I hear alot. Does that mean that we are normally working dumb?

• by theyknowitsxmas on 3/21/22, 7:27 PM

  This stuff is awful. Even at my factory job no one understood when I said "white collar job."

  "What's a white collar job?"

  I will never use jargon again.

  "WHAT ARE YOU DOIN' USING YOUR BIG SCHOOL WORDS. JUST USE NORMAL PEOPLE WORDS AND I'LL UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT."

  -Ricky, Trailer Park Boys

• by WesolyKubeczek on 3/21/22, 12:36 PM

  Wartime metaphors are the worst somehow, from people who know jack shit about war especially.

• by cyanydeez on 3/22/22, 12:54 AM

  Businesses are social cancer after a certain threshold.