Jargon (no spam)

[fable]

I'm using the word jargon here in its specialized sense as a vocabulary or set of idioms common to a group of people and used to make themselves seem special, while keeping others out. So genuine technology vocabulary meant strictly to ease communication is not jargon in this sense of the word. Got that?

With that in mind, I'd been reading an essay by a well-known and heavily biased essayist on Soviet Era musicology. He's pompous, biased, and about as honorable as a sewer pipe, but what gets me is his ever-present willingness to employ jargon to impress non-professionals in the crowd. For example, iin one essay, he insists on categorizing "signs or symbols" in Shostakovich symphonies as "syntactic/introversive" or "semantic/extroversive." All of which simply means that there are musical references in the symphonies to other passages in the same works, or to passages in other works.

It's typical for composers to sometimes refer back to themes earlier in the same work, or to quote themselves from other works, or even occasionally themes by other composers. But if I state it that way, it loses its professional mystique. In a word, it becomes comprehensible. You're no longer standing on the outside of a great mystery, eager to be let in.

Please state your own examples of this kind of jargon.

[Silur]

So genuine technology vocabulary meant strictly to ease communication is not jargon in this sense of the word. Got that?

Now, either you are naive enough to actually believe this, or you're joking. Techspeak in the computer industry is primarily to sort you into the right religious faction, and second to sometimes simplify communication. I say sometimes, because most of the time it's used to confuse your opponent, colleagues or customers into bowing down and pay homage to your geeky highness.

[fable]

Now, either you are naive enough to actually believe this, or you're joking.

I'm trying to establish a difference between techspeak as a method to confuse the uninitiated and enthuse the egos of the initiated (jargon), and a techspeak which encapsulates in very few words complex conditions that otherwise would take a long time to describe and explain.

So stop arguing my terms, or I'll feed you to my pet gerund. How about some examples of typical techspeak among computer techies, Silur?

[jopperm2]

I know the only reason I use jargon is to flaunt how utterly thirteen thirty-seven I am.

All of the jargon I use tends to be grammar related. That's because a large portion of my job is reading email and telling people how they messed it up. :laugh:

There's nothing like arguing via email about the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs with someone in Manila who barely speaks English.

<edit> I forgot to mention why I use as much jargon as possible. I do it so that the people in Manila will think they're in over their heads and just do what I tell them.

[fable]

There, now: that's honesty for you! It's refreshing to find someone who admits they try to confound customers in a slim attempt to retain their own sanity, however ineffective those attempts may be. Thank you, Brother Jop.

[jopperm2]

Thanks fable!

I'm still arguing with that woman in the Philippines over this sentence:

"Thank you for contacting the Ford Motor Company Customer Relationship Center requesting for the contact information of Mr. Brehmer."

It seems there is nothing I can say to her to get her to understand that that's wrong! She's emailing me stuff about transitive verbs and gerund phrases.. I just want to tell her "YOU DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!!!"

[Silur]

The prefered method is of course acronyms, where TLA's (three letter acronyms) and ETLA's (extended three letter acronyms) are the predominant kind. That's cheating though.

When it comes to religious factions, there's any number of them and on any number of levels. Lets start with Operating systems for instance, where you have MicroSerfs vs Penguinlovers vs *BSD nuts vs Mainframe old guys etc. Within for instance the Penguinlover faction you will find Redhatzombies vs Debinazis vs Genitools vs Ubuntu (You dont even need to make fun of this one...) etc. Within the Debinazi faction there's purists and sellouts. The list goes on.

One term that will instantly separate you into the M$ category is to refer to reusable program snippets as "Dynamically link libraries", whereas calling them "Shared libraries" is more ambiguous. Both mean the same thing. If someone uses the term "shareable images" in this context, then they're VMS buffs, an ancient cult with much forgotten wisdom.

A similar distinction can be made between people talking about Gigahertz clockspeeds vs Instruction pipeline depth and Branch prediction pre-cache miss overhead, which solidly places you either in the Intel worship, or more ambiguously in the PowerPC/Amd underdog category. These terms have no real relation except being different parameters that together define the processing speed of a processor. Nowadays, even Intel has left GHz behind, but the legacy will remain for some time.

Using the wrong term in the wrong place will have serious repercussions on your credibility. I accidentally said "ESRP" when I meant "HSRP" at a meeting a few days back, and everyone looked at me like I'd just farted loudly. They didn't quite believe me when I said I was just clearing my throat. Again, they mean the same thing, but are coined by two different vendors who are deadly enemies in the marketplace.

[fable]

LOL! That's wonderful: jargon not only as a means of establishing clique superiority, but as a method of pissing on one's boudaries to keep the other junkyard dog gangs off.

[jopperm2]

It's also a good way to make fun of people who don't know anything about computers without letting them know you're making fun of them. Example:

Boss: Josh can you fix my computer
Josh, looking at computer: I'm afraid it's a PEBKAC error.
Boss: What can I do about it?
Josh: I recommend calling help desk and telling them about it.. They'll be dying to know. I doubt they can fix it though.

Boss, calling help desk: . . .yeah, Josh said it's a pebb cack error, can you fix that?
Helpdesk: ... (you can't hear him because he dropped the phone and is now on the floor dying in laughter.
Boss: You there?
Helpdesk, still catching breath: (fighting laughter) Yeah... I think that's a good diagnosis... There's definitely no cure though.

:laugh:

[fable]

Let's please stay on subject, per the first post.

[jopperm2]

Yeah, yeah.. Just kidding. I didn't realize that was too spammy. Which in itself is a form of forum jargon..

I also use a lot of jargon to exlude our agents from conversation here.

If I'm talking to management people or other people in quality, we'll fancy things up a lot more than necessary so that average Joe has no idea what we're talking about. It has the same effect as this writer you're reading, but it serves a different purpose. He wants to appear important by confusing the reader.. We want to confuse the listener because we're important and don't want him to know what we're talking about.

[RandomThug]

when I was 18 I had a job at Edelbrock Corp. A auto parts manufacturer. I was the only other Tech on this job, with over 600 users. My main boss, the CFO, was a short aggro and very annoying greek man. He would always come back to our little dungeon and ask questions that really didn't need to be asked.

my boss at the time taught me something very special.

"Just mix terms together and string them along so he gets confused and he will leave you alone"

For Example.
(CFO BOSS) - "Hey there whats with the new hardware in the server room, has it been installed yet? The girls in sales say the machines are still as slow as before? Any reason why?"

Me - "Well you see (Boss) the problem lies within the RAM buffer. I wanted to deploy the hardware into the system but the machine cant handle the upgrade, see the front side bus wont work if the multiproccesor isn't capable of handling the packets that are constantly being diverted by the switches. Which leaves us with a collection of desktops that cant run at the right efficency. Of course I'll be able to get it to work soon, its just we have to handle the filters on the webproxy for nortons system works. We've been having random TCPIP issues that we think are caused by the sysprep on the image."

Basically the reality was the girls pc's just had a bunch of spyware on them and the server was already setup, i just didnt want to talk to him. About half way through that he was about to leave...


At times its like lying to your girl about being at your buddies playing poker. You can tell her that you were playing poker but you leave out the fact that their were several chicks there as well. Sure I didn't do anything wrong with those girls, but she doesn't need to know. My boss didn't need to know exactly why things did what they did, I doubt he'd get it much anyhow.

Also with Client's I tend to be honest as possible. When someone is handing me cash for work I am doing right there (Not the corporate environment) I wont use jargon. Its f'd up cause I could just milk older people for hundreds of bucks, which I know people do. I use jargon to keep conversations short or to confuse someone so they wont realize the reason things arn't done is because im on gamebanshee talking about not getting things done.