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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Excellent article, misleading post title. It's a satire on book marketing trends from a writer's point of view. It attacks the Web 2.0 trend. The article is not about "techie" speak, at all.

It has some pearls on the situation of a decaying industry.

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Coming from the marketing world, this is all too true. Marketers think that everyone cares as much about fads as they do, so they think that when they spew about them everyone knows what the hell they mean.

Everyone who is very deep in a single area with jargon and fads has a hard time sorting out what is a reasonable level of knowledge to expect.

In this sense, marketers & programmers are kin.

The message of the article (or the combination of the article and title) appeared to be that geeks should work to make tech-speak more "manageable" for business types.

While this might be true in specific situations X and Y, as a general rule I disagree quite strongly. We have technical words because they are an accurate way of describing stuff. I would much rather have business and marketing people speaking with their real jargon than "talking down" to me. I'm perfectly capable of consulting a dictionary or asking for assistance if a business type throws a strange term my way. This is because I respect business knowledge and don't trivialize what those people do and/or expect it to be easily understood.

Sure, marketing types shouldn't need to get a CS degree. But if we should definitely be using real words like "router" and "system memory" and not invoke a whole basket full of failed birds-and-bees analogies to explain these concepts (at least not by default. If they ask for an explanation an analogy can be invoked.)

The submitter's point (which I realize is not the original sense of the article) is that technical jargon is needlessly complex, complex to no useful end. If network topology and time complexity and so on were really one-to-one with nice neat English words, we wouldn't need 4-year (or masters, or doctorate) degrees in technical fields, and to assume that alternate English words exist is to assume the simplicity of technical work. But every technical term exists for a needful purpose--to describe something for which an existing word is inadequate. Thus in the general case, the technical term for something is the optimal word to use, in that it most-precisely describes its object.

This reveals (on the part of people with this mindset, not necessarily the submitter) some sort of superiority complex, or at least not showing proper respect for people who are probably every bit as smart as you.

Yes but really really bad post title. Is nothing to do with techie talk, that was the first thing that bugged me.

I think the use of the term "geek" is reasonable: I am seeing that term apply more and more to anyone with a deep/obsessive interest in a subject.

I agree. "Geek" has become, to me, anyway, a synonym for "enthusiast". One can be a computer geek, or a business geek, or an artisan bread geek. One characteristic trait of any kind of geekdom is using jargon with an inappropriate audience.

You'll have to pardon me, I've got a batard that needs to proof.

Its also rarely seen as insulting these days.

This is indeed a comparison of how book promotion works now versus then, told in magazine-friendly fictional story format. While the use of awkward phrasing could be pinned on the lack of proper terminology, much of it is obviously conceived out of thin air in order to underscore the rapid pace of technology change, as well as make it a more fun, more accessible read.

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