Jargon and Buzzwords

Erin has a wonderful piece on the awful prevalence of jargon in business entitled, “Strong Language.”

Jargon not only makes us look stupid, it actually makes us stupid. When our language is diluted by vagueness, obfuscation, and euphemism, our ability to construct and evaluate arguments is blunted. We substitute faulty shortcuts for ideas and our critical foundations begin to crumble.

There’s a vast difference between developing a common conceptual model and vocabulary to discuss a new area of interest and just coming up with jargon. I suspect we know when we’re participating in the latter.