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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It's actually a useful device when you like to pull an analogy. Instead of explaining the whole idea, you throw a jargon and everyone constructs the rest in their head and understand it and know how to work with it. The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions, so it works as a rails and compression for ideas.

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Jargon like that in the link makes the message less precise and more meaningless, in my view.

Just simply state what you mean. Let the other person ask questions if they need clarification.

There is no single "just simply" though. All communication is based on an (inherently fallible) estimate of the recipient's mental-state, priorities, and knowledge-base.

For example, "I would like one head of lettuce" is a kind of jargon-lite for "I would like one portion of the fully-grown plant known as lettuce which is found above-ground as a connected unit in nature." Which one leads to a "simpler" exchange will depend on your assumptions about the recipient.

Except that "one head of lettuce" is a widely-known "measure" that most people are going to understand.

Most of this business-speak jargon is incomprehensible to people who haven't heard it before in the workplace. It seems "normal" to people like us here on HN because most of us have interacted with these sorts of business types (or are even one of them), but I would guess that most of the people who know what a head of lettuce represents would have no idea what ROI or noun-form "solve" means.

I never said the marriage satire was normal. (Although, in that fictional world, those two fictional people seem to be surprisingly satisfied with their choices of language.)

Just that "simple" is deceptive, non-universal, and sometimes contradictory.

That's good when you explain something technical to a layman, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about explaining non-technical issue to a technical person using jargon for analogy.

For example you can use P2P to explain how some gossip spread or you can say that your relationship with SO is like UDP recently.

So it's low latency and fast but in some contexts, firewalled?

It's like can't tell if she heard you

How is "like UDP" clearer than just saying that?

It's not clearer, it's deeper. It implies a state and creates an image in the listeners mind. You can throw it casually when explaining something and your audience now has an image in their head so you can explain the actual thing you are after.

Jargons are shortcuts to pre-agreed ideas. Just a tool.

In this case, I assure you it does not add depth, clarity, images. You're just using it as a kind of in-group joke.

I agree: it's absolutely an in-group joke. Maybe not joke, but a cutesy in-group way of expressing something.

Certainly someone who gets it will, well, get it. But in general it seems like a lot of effort in most cases to gauge whether or not the recipient will understand at the level you hope. Even the UDP example could be misunderstood by someone who is well-versed. Unreliable? A good low-level thing to build stuff on top of? These are both plausible meanings, but would convey very different things.

Better to just use clear language.

It means that you are not the intended audience because you know too much or too little about UDP.

Once I had a physicist friend freak out over my use of "exponential" to loosely explain something because he instantly began thinking about edge cases and obviously using "logarithmic" would have been more precise. We were not on the same page with the jargon, but then again I guess it requires social skills too so that you can pick where the analogy starts and ends.

My biggest pet peeve is when people use "exponential" to describe an increase defined by two points (i.e. "Americans are anticipated to consume exponentially more cookies in 2025 than they did in 2024"). Fully meaningless.

I think the udp example is a counterexample personally.

"Hmm udp, so ...unreliable and...hmm...but high throughput?...hm, good to build stuff on top of?"

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, yet I know exactly what udp is.

If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?

It means that we are not on the same page with that and should not be used. With jargon, audience is everything.

Also, you use it in context. The jargon becomes illustrative for the analogy, not precise definition. After all, human can't have UDP connection.

> If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?

It's not. Well, if the person you're talking to happens to get the intended meaning immediately, it's a cute in-joke. To me, that's the only real (dubious) benefit.

I mean, if you describe a relationship in terms of a protocol, sure, you're giving an interesting signal about the relationship, but probably not what you intended to say.

> The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions

Well, not always. Per Webster:

1: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group

2: obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words

It would be great if it were only (1) but I’d often (2)

These are some effects of a jargon but the reason for its existence is precision. You learn it in an institution and then you are on the same page and there's no ambiguity over its meaning. Using jargon with a layperson is useless and could be stupid or pretentious.

> but the reason for its existence is precision

In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.

I don't know why is this obsession over jargon. I know the cliche, it's not true at all except when you misuse it. Maybe can be used as part of a fraud or some power move or something like that but its intended use case is a shortcut to predefined ideas. It may have side effects but that doesn't mean that those side effects are the reason to exist.

I am making an empirical statement. The majority of its actual use in life is to achieve social/political ends, not to improve communication. If you want to say the majority of its use is misuse, fine. But the misuse is intentional.

I disagree entirely, jargon use is to help us from keeping defining things so we can move on to the next problem. How do you even use "unsprung weight" or "distributed cache" for social or political ends? Maybe it can be used at some cringe encounter with layperson but that's not at all what jargon is used for.

Something like "distributed cache" is valid jargon. I already conceded that it can be useful. But the majority of it (by raw numbers) is the kind of stuff of the OP is lampooning -- business and office jargon. Of course there is plenty of scientific and mathematical jargon that's legitimate shorthand.

Even there, however, the line blurs. That is, you have terms with legitimate use that were poorly chosen. Sometimes the poor choice is historical accident, but often it's motivated by a desire to sound more impressive and complicated that it is. Something like "applicative functor" might fall into this category.

I absolutely agree that some people use jargon as a gatekeeping device or an in-group detector, and that's lame.

But jargon does have value in communication where you know the person you're talking to understands it at the level you do. Jargon, when used well, can let you be simultaneously more precise and more terse.

Think about times you've sent email or even just chat messages to different professional audiences. You're probably going to use different language when talking to a manager vs. a sales person vs. an engineer. I'm not talking about level of formality; the actual language you use to describe the topic at hand will change. Some of that will be a matter of the level of detail you provide, but some of it will likely include jargon (when you're conversing with someone in the same "group" as you), and you might not even realize it.

Jargon feels like 1 for the ingroup and 2 for the outgroup.

These 1 and 2 are pretty much always apply at the same time.

Wherever 1 or 2 applies just depends on how used you're to the usage of said jargon.

Office jargon in particular fulfills a social signalling role rather than a clear communication role. It's intended to tell upper management: "I'm one of you guys, please look kindly upon me and maybe promote me!" But there's a dynamic similar to that of "U" English vs. "non-U English"[0], as upper management is more likely to say things like "Just get the fucking thing shipped. Our business depends on it."

[0] It turns out that in England, upper-class aspirants are likely to use posher phrases and idioms than actual upper-class people, as the latter are aware of their own and others' social status and have no need for verbal affectations to communicate it. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

it only works with other white collar people who have heard the same jargon, normal people in the real world just won't understand what you're saying, so it's just bad communication

That's right, with jargons the audience is the key.

Except that with e.g. technical jargon, the audience is important because non-technical people don’t have the training/experience to understand what’s being said.

With office jargon, I understand everything being said, but the majority of it could be stated more simply and clearly without the use of it. This type of jargon is a social signaling tool, not a useful shortcut or simplification (again, most of the time). It’s also harder to parse for non-native speakers of English.

Yeah, and then you sound like a jargoff.

Jargon is everywhere but office jargon is its own sub genre.

For office jargon, it's maybe not a practical matter, but I could see a friend being a little put off by someone speaking in office jargon to them. Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design

IMHO office jargon is just as useful but because it's not technical its harder to adjust.

>Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design

That's one of it's functions. Instead of going over each time that the thing happening isn't personal and shouldn't be taken as such, you can utilize the jargon to keep it clean. After all, it's just a job where everyone tries to play their role to produce something. It hurts much more badly if you confuse the office work for a social interaction and things don't pan out at some point.

Jargon is as much about social signaling as anything else.

Consider Cockney Rhyming Slang, which is intended to be insider-only speech.

Consider the rise and then mass-adoption of Valley Girl.

Yeah and an "artifact" of that "compression" is the "signal" that "you're a dork"

Jargon should be used only with the appropriate audience, obviously.

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