Silly Jargon Redux:

I guess my earlier post didn't really describe what I wanted to say. I was mainly complaining about the extremely technical aspect of everyone's presentations in that class. It seemed to me that none of the groups (including mine) really knew the technology that they were trying to explain in class. They were just using fancy sounding jargon and acronyms.


"Apart from being valuable concepts your ability to state them in such fancy terms is impressive too."

No it's not. Being able to describe it so that your grandma can understand it, is impressive. Using fancy terms is a tool semi-informed people use to make other people impressed. Unfortunatly it doesn't work if the other person knows anything about the topic at all. It's better to stay quiet and appear an idiot that open your mouth and remove all doubt.

What I am saying about the particular phrases is, that they sold a lot of books over the last 10 years, but have lost a lot of their meaning to people in general, not that the ideas they represent are any less valuable. It's my opinion that if you use the phrase, "Thinking outside the box", more than a handful of times in your life, you have never actually "thought outside the box". Why not just say, thinking with a non-traditional point of view. It could be because no one ever sold a million copies of the book "Thinking with a non-traditional point of view".

Athough this may be one of my idiosyncrasies, but I hate it when people use words when they don't know what they mean. (Think ignorant = rude) Or when people try to latinize words(to make them sound latin) . For example the words: use and utilize. People who use the word utilize really bug me. Why not use the word use? Utilize doesn't mean use. Here is an excerpt from the link, about the word utilize:


Usage Note: A number of critics have remarked that utilize is an unnecessary substitute for use. It is true that many occurrences of utilize could be replaced by use with no loss to anything but pretentiousness, for example, in sentences such as They utilized questionable methods in their analysis or We hope that many commuters will continue to utilize mass transit after the bridge has reopened. But utilize can mean "to find a profitable or practical use for." Thus the sentence The teachers were unable to use the new computers might mean only that the teachers were unable to operate the computers, whereas The teachers were unable to utilize the new computers suggests that the teachers could not find ways to employ the computers in instruction.


Anyway, this is getting a little long, and would be more suited to an actual conversation the next time I come home to visit.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818), letter to John Adams, 1774

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
Doug Larson