{"id":930,"date":"2020-09-07T16:42:02","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T16:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aeoneal.com\/blog\/?p=930"},"modified":"2020-09-08T02:01:01","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T02:01:01","slug":"why-jargon-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aeoneal.com\/blog\/why-jargon-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why jargon matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

A syllabus from one of my UX classes; just the lesson titles are full of jargon! Each column is a week of lessons and events.<\/p><\/div>\n

My ex-spouse, bless his heart, contributed some good to my life. (I can say this twenty years later, sixteen years into a marriage to the right partner. About the first one, all I can say is that every relationship sucks if it\u2019s the wrong one, no matter how well-intentioned and good the people involved.)<\/p>\n

Possibly the most important good he contributed to my tech career was this advice: \u201cJargon matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let me say that again, more loudly:<\/p>\n

Jargon matters<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Everyone hates jargon, right? It\u2019s used by some to exclude outsiders and preserve territory (lawyers and doctors, I\u2019m looking at you!), or by others to show off being part of the \u201cin\u201d group at work. Sometimes it\u2019s misused, and depending on the likability of the person making the mistake and the empathy of the observers, colleagues feel one of two excellent German concepts: Schadenfreude (pleasure in another\u2019s misfortune) or Fremdsch\u00e4men (embarrassment on someone else\u2019s behalf).<\/p>\n

Metaphors for perfectly good alternative phrases are some of the most irritating jargon, and every so often an article appears with a headline like, \u201cThe Sixteen Most Irritating Jargon Phrases,\u201d or, \u201cTen Pieces of Jargon That Are Past Their Prime.\u201d They\u2019ll tell you never to \u201cput a pin in that\u201d or \u201cleverage\u201d the \u201clong tail,\u201d and similar metaphors that admittedly spring from a trend and should probably pass with that trend.<\/p>\n

Still, some jargon is good. This is the jargon my ex was talking about. It was 1997, and I was studying psychology but learning HTML and Perl and such to ramp up my tech skills for the web. Ex would hear me describing something instead of using the right word for it, and one day he gave me a book (I think it was on webmaster skills) to read and told me to use the right words. He shared some hard truths: I was a woman, my degree wasn\u2019t in computer science (even though I took a ton of computer science courses: Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, systems and architecture, etc.), and if I didn\u2019t use the right word for the concept, no one would take me seriously.<\/p>\n

He was right.<\/p>\n

I spent a lot of time telling my students to use the right terms, because Ex wasn\u2019t just right. He was very<\/strong> right. Not knowing the right term can kill you dead in an interview or a job, especially if you\u2019re self-taught or inexperienced.<\/p>\n

Terms of art<\/h2>\n

If you absolutely, positively can\u2019t bear the thought of using jargon, think instead of using the right terms of art<\/strong> for your field. Every field has them.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the same word means different things in different fields. When I first began my web career (still in school, mind), I worked with people from a variety of fields. My background was primarily psychology, with strong concentrations in biology and computer science, and a dash of technical library experience. (I am not a librarian by any means, but I was a senior library database technician, and I led projects for client libraries and cataloged a very few things for one project; these were reviewed by an actual cataloger, of course.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, as a knowledge engineer at a telecom company I worked with linguists, a biology major, librarians, and of course programmers. I noticed that confusion often arose from people using the same word, but with a different meaning according to their field\u2019s jargon. To combat this I created the now-defunct Perspectives<\/em>, a knowledge engineering dictionary I hosted myself. Words were sorted by field and alphabetically, so you could look up a given word and see how different fields used it.<\/p>\n

Catalog<\/em> is a great example. At least three distinct definitions exist, depending on your field of expertise.<\/p>\n