Orwell's Politics and the English Language has a superb rewrite of a passage from Ecclesiastes:
- I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Rewritten in a jargonist dialect of English of 1946:
- Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Business Jargon
Public sector Jargon
I think I got the basic thrust of public-sector jargon in How not to write, inspired by a report on the future of libraries and a report on the strategic planning for Thames Valley Police.
Technical Jargon
Technical jargon is the least insufferable of the jargons: they are created often by people who are making a good faith effort not to baffle, but not to talk down either (although there is always the marketing department, which isn't acting in good faith like the techies are). The difference between, say, "Semantic Web" and, say, the "public sphere" is that the former seems confusing for those outside of the relevant technical field, but if one enters the sphere of discourse where such topics are discussed, one will find that there is actually a there there - that the Semantic Web has pretty clearly defined boundaries, and someone involved in that area can quite quickly tell you what it is and what it does and does not cover. The "public sphere" on the other hand is a vague term that doesn't actually clarify or make useful anything since it covers an astonishingly large amount of things which are, by their very nature, disparate. A politician speaking on television or in Parliament is participating in "the public sphere", but so is a teacher in a classroom, a lecturer in a seminar room, a drunk grumbling on the bus, a policeman while arresting someone, a citizen on a soap-box at Speaker's Corner or in a letter to a newspaper - but we make a lot of clear distinctions. We are perfectly happy for raving nutcases to stand up at Speaker's Corner and tell everyone that the end of the world is nigh, but we are less happy about letting them do that in a secondary school geography classroom. Technical terms of art are fine if they make life easier for the technical people, but when used in places where non-technical people are likely to come across them, they need to be explained.
- David Pogue at the New York Times has some sensible advice on words worth avoiding in the realm of consumer technology.
Web 2.0 Jargon
The problem with Web 2.0 jargon, like most jargon, is that it's used by tossers to mean something very general and undefined, and that makes it so much harder for people who actually know what's going on to use it.
- Ajax - means JavaScript remoting to normal people, means any form of nifty-looking JavaScript to Web 2.0 idiots
- aggregate - making money off other people's creative work by copy-pasting it.
- cloud computing - can mean anything from Amazon's EC2 to Google AppEngine to Microsoft Outlook Web Access. The practical upshot is Amazon selling cheap hosting and making the market cheaper for those who aren't so brain-dead they can't figure out how to install Debian. Oh, and Google Docs means you don't have to torrent Microsoft Office quite so often. Cloud computing can actually be useful, but the people who bang on about it endlessly having never actually booted up an EC2 AMI are tossers.
- Davos - formerly a conference of economists, business leaders and politicians, now a pointless meetup for A-list bloggers
- Education 2.0 - like Education 1.0, but with less book-reading, less lectures from experts, less exams and more reading Wikipedia. Now available from world-respected institutions like the University of Phoenix.
- grass-roots - if it has to be said that something is grass-roots, it usually isn't.
- GTD - a spooky cult that has some good advice on how to be productive, but then ruins it by spending extended periods masturbating about Filofaxes.
- hardcore developer - a developer who, when not building the next hot Facebook app, stars as the arsehole in femdom-fisting videos. Actually, no, it's just a developer who actually knows how to actually do anything other than JavaScript copy-pasting.
- learning object - a self-contained unit of learning. In the old-fashioned days of Education 1.0, this was know as a book.
- long tail - means that instead of getting to watch the latest episode of 24, all you get to do is watch some idiot mime the theme tune. Also code word for the endless shit parade of crappy indie bands and YouTube attention whores.
- monetize - actually make money from something. Such a shocking idea that it has a verb of it's very own.
- netbook - a cheap (£100-£300 rather than £500+) and teeny (7"-11" rather than 12"+) laptop that usually has big batteries, a smallish CPU, sometimes SSDs rather than HDDs, and often marketed with Linux or Windows XP. Some people find the keys annoyingly small. Loved by the modding community, loved by many hackers and loved by people who don't like the backache of carrying a fucking huge laptop around with them, or who would much rather be mugged when they are carrying a £150 laptop than when they are carrying a £1500 laptop). All simple enough, right? Web 2.0 enthusiasts think that if you have bought a netbook rather than a laptop you are now automatically going to prefer using the whole Google Docs, Google Apps "cloud" suite of products than, oh, notepad.exe. Some, like TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, think that the arrival of netbooks and Google Chrome now means that we are going to stop booting into Windows and Mac OS, and rather boot directly into Google Chrome. Why? Fuck knows. Because, you know, sticking WebKit on top of a shit-hot JavaScript engine and putting each thread in a tab is the first step in building the next-gen OS. And when your computer boots directly into Google Chrome, and you get your fifteen year old scanner with a damn COM port on the back and plug it through a few conversion boxes in to your computer, what the fuck is Chrome going to do: serve it some HTML? Maybe fire off an Ajax request to it asking whether or not it's Web 2.0 compliant? Yes, fucking 'tards have no idea what an operating system is. That's how you become a tech journalist.
- passionate (of potential employees) - willing to work nights and weekends except for equity which will never actually turn into anything useful.
- pro-blogger - cancerous arsehole who took an independent media form and turned it into a medium whereby he makes money for informing other shit-wits how to "problog". A pyramid scheme soon follows, with people retweeting how they can tweet about blogging about blogging about making money with blogging by blogging.
- retweet - ultimate form of laziness, whereby one's complete inability to fill even 140 characters of ASCII is solved by copying what someone else posted. People for whom retweets make up more than 10% of their tweetstream can be called re-twats or re-tards with impunity. Non re-tards use favouriting instead.
- SEO - ensuring that marketing shit comes up higher than useful content on Google
- social graph - means social network, but stupid people think 'social network' means only a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter so have to use 'social graph', despite the fact that nobody except mathematicians and RDF dorks (like me) know what a graph is.
- social media - the online equivalent of sneaking into a school playground to sell drugs
- social media expert - a tosser who has figured out how to use Facebook and thinks this is a marketable skill
- TechMeme - website where bloggers who earnestly use these buzzwords are aggregated so everyone else can avoid them. Often contains hilarious drama when one buzzword maniac completely misunderstands what another buzzword maniac is saying due to both being tossers whose only skill is writing about how exciting the technology they don't understand is.
- thought leaders - tossers; original because everyone around them isn't.
- Twitter - a fun app where you can keep your friends and colleagues up-to-date with what you are up to. Whether that means quoting Proust at them or describing your last shit, it's all good fun. For social media tards, Twitter is a game where you open up TweetDeck, search for social media and then retweet everything containing the term social media. If you retweet more than everybody else, you win. By doing this, they expect to cure cancer, when in fact thay are providing a potent cure for insomnia.
- vlog - a weblog where people post videos. Sometimes available as a video podcast, so you can do something useful like download them and watch them on your phone or MP3 player. Often just means a feed of shitty YouTube clips. When someone says "I'm vlogging this", you can use this as a sure-fire way to work out that they are a tosser.
- webinar - an online seminar, primarily organised by and for tossers
- Web two-oh or "Web 20" - for the people too lazy to say "dot" or "point" (who themselves are too lazy to say what they actually mean, so use a lazy buzzword)
- XRI - fail with cream on top.