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This is not the reason jargon exists. What made you say that? > It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they did
by ohbtvz 4y ago
This is not the reason jargon exists. What made you say that?
> 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?
- krona 4y ago> This is not the reason jargon exists. What made you say that? Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct.
- ohbtvz 4y agoI don't have the book at hand. Do you have a more precise quote?
- sjducb 4y agoWhat is the real reason that jargon exists? Ostensibly it's to increase precision and allow experts to communicate quickly with each other. However that explaination can't explain phrases like "Ring-fence", "Let's take this offline", "360 degree feedback". All of those phrases have better simple English translations.
- ohbtvz 4y agoYour examples are not jargon, they're metaphors. 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.
- incone123 4y agoSome government websites are intended for a specialist audience. I think it's great that the site for paying my car tax is very simple but I would not expect the instructions for using a government data API to be written in the same way.
- ohbtvz 4y agoI don't think anyone is saying otherwise. It's clear that the discussion is about general public-facing government websites. Something for which the intended audience is a large portion of the population.
- sjducb 4y agoYour not recognising jargon from other fields. All of those phrases have precise technical definitions. For example "360 degree feedback" is when a manager's direct report is asked to give feedback about their manager. In other words you give feedback about your boss, often to your boss. It doesn't really make sense as a phrase or metaphor. It should really be 180 degree feedback because if you turn 360 degrees you're facing the same way that you started.... But that makes it even better jargon. It signals that you've been on some management training courses.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> To "launch" something is jargon? Not if it's a boat or a plane. Otherwise, probably yes.