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.

Web 2.0 Jargon

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