<story><title>A simple guide on words to avoid in government</title><url>https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/16/a-simple-guide-on-words-to-avoid-in-government/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjducb</author><text>I think this ignores the reason jargon exists. -- To demonstrate that the speaker is part of the &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; crowd.&lt;p&gt;If you stop using jargon then people assume you don&amp;#x27;t know what you&amp;#x27;re talking about. This affect is real. Your precieved credibility goes way down when you stop speaking in jargon.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn&amp;#x27;t do that then we would think they didn&amp;#x27;t know about websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>&amp;gt; I think this ignores the reason jargon exists. -- To demonstrate that the speaker is part of the &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; crowd.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s unnecessarily cynical. It certainly can give off that impression. But it is also a shortcut for people who work together in a specific domain to be more precise (or more general) than would be implied by non-jargon speech.  So to me those things in the sky are just clouds, but to a meteorologist they might be stratocumulus or cirrus.&lt;p&gt;Another case, a similar one, is the stickiness of obsolete language in a certain domains. I&amp;#x27;ve never used the word &amp;quot;cloture&amp;quot; in a sentence,* but to use it is faster for those who need it than to spell it out.  In law, some obsolete words not only carry specific meaning but can call back to existing case law.&lt;p&gt;For HN, CPU is a good example, being an old word whose precise meaning is quite fluid (used to be literally the cabinet with merely the ALU and some registers; instruction decode was just how it was wired together) and so is jargon too.&lt;p&gt;* until writing that sentence of course.</text></comment>
<story><title>A simple guide on words to avoid in government</title><url>https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/16/a-simple-guide-on-words-to-avoid-in-government/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjducb</author><text>I think this ignores the reason jargon exists. -- To demonstrate that the speaker is part of the &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; crowd.&lt;p&gt;If you stop using jargon then people assume you don&amp;#x27;t know what you&amp;#x27;re talking about. This affect is real. Your precieved credibility goes way down when you stop speaking in jargon.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn&amp;#x27;t do that then we would think they didn&amp;#x27;t know about websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cafard</author><text>Twenty years ago or so I got a copy of &lt;i&gt;Database Design for Mere Mortals&lt;/i&gt; to review for a users&amp;#x27; group. The author spent several pages almost-but-not-quite defining Third Normal Form, without ever using the expression. I complained of this in the review.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why jargon exists. It is much better to use 3NF or BCNF or simply normalize or denormalize than to bury the point in many words.
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