I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
263 karma · joined September 29, 2022
I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
It's easy. When you don't know a lot of math beyond college, but you see a post like this one, voting it up lets you pretend that you're in-the-know. "Oh yeah, I'm competent enough to upvote this. I know math." You may even end up fooling yourself into believing it. Same thing happens with physics, chemistry, linguistics... posts.
Jargon exists because specialists in a subject want to communicate quickly among themselves, instead of paraphrasing all the time. I'm a mathematician, if I had to use plain-English words instead of jargon in my papers, I would go insane. But my papers aren't meant for the general public (although they're welcome to read them), they're meant for a specialist audience. This is not the case of government websites.
For example, you wrote "The advice [...] seems somewhat pointless to me." Well, are you saying that it is pointless, or not? I don't know you, so I don't know what your scale of pointlessness is. I don't know what "somewhat pointless" corresponds to. Is it a tiny bit pointless, is it a medium amount of pointlessness, something else? I don't know, but I have to think about it because you wrote a meaningless word in your sentence. And even once I have understood the sentence, I am left thinking: "well, if it's only somewhat pointless, maybe it's not pointless after all!"
The same thing happens with "key stakeholders": now I have to think about a hierarchy of stakeholders. What scale is being used? Who's key, who's non-key? Does the sentence apply to all stakeholders, only some of them?
Multiply this by a hundred occurrences in a long document, and you obtain something that will be more difficult to read. But government documents have to be readable by everyone: people whose native tongue is not English, uneducated people who have trouble reading simple texts, etc. And for what? Sugarcoating your text so that it's less assertive? Showing literary prowess?
> It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.
To "launch" something is jargon?
As soon as you need encryption in at least one place in your software, it's going to happen.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
Send them... How? You're planning on setting up a MITM attack on everyone's internet access?