Welcome to the jargon junkyard: The rise and fall of buzzwords

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse on November 14, 2015.

Is it time to reevaluate the value (or not) of some of the jargon we have gone used to and to recognise (and “retrench”, to use another euphemism) those dinosaurs who failed to evolve with the times?   

“Big data” has been dethroned as “real-time data” has taken the reins. “Troubleshooting” is on its way out: the preferred term now is either “problem-solving” or “diagnosing”. And, other buzzwords like “virtual team” and “subject matter expert” may also have fallen victim to this extinction event. These were the conclusions reached by a study of 500,000 tech job postings by Seattle firm Textio (as Bloomberg Business reported recently).  

Image credit: By Dellex (Own work) /CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

If a word or phrase is used frequently widely enough - especially if picked up by social media or the blogosphere - it can quickly become part of the industry vernacular. But these buzzwords tend invariably to also have a short shelf life being quickly be replaced by others seen to be more attuned to the zeitgeist. The Textio study found, for instance, that among the five technology-related terms that lost the most impact only two were even on the map a year ago. Not many of them could hope for the longevity of say “synergy” (introduced perhaps in the 1800s) or “paradigm shift” (which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhns first identified in 1962 and is still popular with theorists in fields as  diverse as science, education and marketing).

Buzzwords rarely become memes, “a unit of cultural transmission” as defined by Richard Dawkins. A meme propagates via diverse communication channels. But, memes do not have to represent some higher social good. They can therefore be good, bad and ugly. Examples range from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to Britney Spears and Chopin’s Etudes to computer viruses. However, what they all have in common is the ability to influence prevailing culture.

Buzzwords do offer, while they are around certain benefits:

• ·       Reduced ambiguity: When jargon is employed, essentially everyone in the workplace understands exactly what is implied. Take for example “username” which almost everyone in technology will understand as security is generally considered important in the industry.
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• ·       Less restrictive compared to everyday languages: When buzzwords are used in communication, the rigid syntactical requirements of a language like English or German do not have to be followed closely. For instance, even if the underlying code for an application is in a foreign language (for example SAP ABAP code in German), a developer can usually make sense of it.

Nevertheless, the downside of excessive or improper use of techie-argot can be enormous. These pitfalls include -

• ·       Jargon obstructs effective communication: This happens especially when someone within the industry or workplace interacts with end users or customers. There is always lot of anecdotal evidence of customers contacting call centres and getting confused and frustrated by the mumbo-jumbo they have to listen to. The Wall Street Journal reported a few years back that nearly 90% of patients in the US had difficulty following medical advice because the scientific lingo used was incomprehensible to them. The risks with such gaps in communication have also been recognised by the global aerospace industry where the language most used for technical documentation is English which however may not often be the native language of users. To address this issue, the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe implemented the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe implemented a Simplified Technical English standard in 2013.
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• ·       Humans are not the same as machines:  As an essay on “office speak” in The Atlantic noted, “the techie terms of today suggest that humans are creative computers, whose work is measured in ‘capacity’ and ‘bandwidth’”. The use of such mechanistic terms can be traced back to the Taylorism of the early 1900s and to subsequent economic thought which considered work done by humans on par with other assets used in producing goods and services. This alludes also (intentionally or not) to how workers are treated as dispensable commodities with emphasis on quantity rather than human values. Warren Weaver, one of the pioneers of information theory, cautioned that “information” used in an engineering context (where it refers to quantity) should not be confused with its ordinary connotation of “meaning”. As Raymond Tallis, a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and well-known writer, points out (in his book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and Misrepresentation of Humanity) when neuroscience and psychology commenced using the term “information” they exacerbated this conflation. They considered the neuron as “not just the basic anatomical unit of the nervous system but the basic information-processing unit”. Scientists and other thinkers then began to view the entire organism - the human being - as being subject to the same rules that we apply to computers and mechanical devices.  

The foregoing thus makes us ask: is it time to reevaluate the value (or not) of some of the jargon we have gone used to and to recognise (and “retrench”, to use another euphemism) those dinosaurs who failed to evolve with the times?