I really like your idea of working from the joke backwards, because I think it illustrates both of our points clearly. On one hand, writing that into plain lan

I really like your idea of working from the joke backwards, because I think it illustrates both of our points clearly. On one hand, writing that into plain language would take forever. By the time I'm done, I would have probably written a small book on algebra. Here, the use of jargon is definitely precise. If you wanted to present this in a topology conference, where it might be important that the number of dimensions of the space is infinite, it would be probably a good start. On the other hand, thousands of people use git everyday without understanding a single word of this description. But if I say instead "git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development", my clarity has now skyrocketed. I definitely lost a lot of precision, but my readers will still be able to replicate my results. That's not to say that there is no necessary jargon - my own definition uses "distributed version-control", which is absolutely key for understanding what's going on.