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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> If you stop using jargon then people assume you don't know what you're talking about

I think it's starting to go the other direction. As a technical-minded person if I have a business meeting and the other person starts throwing those yuppie buzzwords in my face I'll just mentally put them in the "empty suit with an MBA" bin.

It might be my Southern European sensibilities, but I value straightforwardness very highly than time wasting nonsense to signal you're part of the in crowd. Unless the hacker ethos has died, and we're back to the 1980 where middle managers in business suits are the cool guys.

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But jargon is not the opposite of straightforwardness, a lot of jargon exists for concise precision[0], and hacker spaces are extremely jargon-heavy.

Hell, your comment is full of jargon. "Yuppie", "buzzword", "suit" (and "empty suit"), ...

[0] though it's usually very contextual when that's the case, which is really frustrating when things are taken out of context and either become completely unintelligible, or easily misinterpreted (and sometimes wilfully misrepresented).

I used those words to be polite and not to call them pillocks. Empty suit isn't jargon, it's a commonly used idiom. Yuppie isn't jargon, I was thinking about the movie American Psycho. It's just a term to refer to your stereotypical middle managers high on their own farts.

Avoiding business jargon doesn't mean having to stick to the 1000 most used English words.

> Empty suit isn't jargon, it's a commonly used idiom.

Sorry to burst your bubble but that’s jargon.

> Yuppie isn't jargon, I was thinking about the movie American Psycho.

It’s also jargon.

> It's just a term to refer to your stereotypical middle managers high on their own farts.

I know what those terms mean.

> business jargon

Oh wow look at those goalposts flying by, amazing.

In what sense are these words jargon? According to both the dictionary and common usage, jargon is the vocabulary of a specific trade or profession. And yet, yuppie is a word understand and used by everyone from crab fisherman to welders to lawyers to software engineers.

This was the first time I was reading the word yuppie. So certainly not a jargon to me.

Yuppie although originally likely a demographic term now has a well understood meaning. It is no longer jargon.

There's not a straightforward consideration of what is jargon, what is slang, and what is argot. Some linguists use the terms synonymously and some have strict theories of categorization, but there's no universal consensus.

In any case, your language here would certainly run afoul of the "simple English" the OP is espousing, and the OP terms such things "jargon", so contextually, yes, it's jargon.

Although personally I agree, the OP is using a particularly sloppy definition of "jargon", which often has a stronger technical connotation than merely metaphorical or business newspeak language.

> commonly used idiom

Which the article points out, though not plainly, should be avoided.

> It's just a term to refer to your stereotypical middle managers high on their own farts.

It means “young urban professional.”

I always heard "young upcoming professional ".

You're still status signalling, just in a different way.

When I wear a T-shirt from a Hackathon to a developer conference I'm signalling just as hard as the sales rep in the suit.

Of course. I'm not so cool (or naive) to think I'm immune to peer pressure and tribalism.

It doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have to go the other way and adopt the mannerisms of the annoying tech guy.

https://youtu.be/02a723LsoFA

> Unless the hacker ethos has died, and we're back to the 1980 where middle managers in business suits are the cool guys.

Those hackers got cool and became the guys in the suits. Dollar Uber Alles

Hum... You lost some changes.

> and we're back to the 1980 where middle managers in business suits are the cool guys.

Nope, we are at the 20's, when social-only corporate climbers know not to use suits on development-dominated cultures (not software development, but "creating new things from known principles" development). So suits are irrelevant nowadays and lost all signaling meaning.

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