June 11, 2016 editorial: comments

Is Jargon a Value Proposition?

For some reason, I’m hypersensitive to jargon words, and many of them grate on me big time. The corporate world, the place where people “grow businesses,” engage in “blamestorming,” and try to “disincentivize“ their rivals, is the epicenter of such babble. 

The combination of the internet and business has produced its share of whoppers. For me, the worst of them all is the word “Webinar.” My skin crawls every time I read or hear it. It’s probably an irrational response on my part, but there’s something about the unnatural way in which those two words were shoved together that makes it so annoying. Why not “web seminar,” or “online tutorial”? I guess some marketing person (a “guru” perhaps?) thought they’d get cutesy, and for some inexplicable reason, “webinar” caught on. 

If you want to have a little fun, go to the the Corporate Gibberish Generator. It’s a website that lets you type in any company name, after which it spews out a paragraph of businessese (uh oh, I just used a jargon word) that’s both incoherent and hilarious.

And of course, there’s email/texting jargon, which mainly consists of shorthand acronyms like LOL or BTW, or FYI. I must admit to using those fairly often, so it would be hypocritical of me to complain about them. However, when you get into the four- and five-letter ones, like YMMV (your mileage may vary) or BBIAS (be back in a second) or IANAL (I am not a lawyer), my jargon-detector starts to go off.

Like any industry, the recording world has its jargon, too. You can “squash” a track, “punch-in” a vocal line, cause a recording to “pump and breathe” due to over-compression, use a “gobo” to help reduce “bleed,” and “lose a generation” (didn’t that happen in World War I?) when mixing down in the analog domain, to name just a few. Maybe it’s because it’s my field of interest, but those terms don’t bug me the way many of the business-related ones do.

So there, I did the “heavy lifting” and the “hypertasking” and I was able to give you a “helicopter view” on the subject. So don’t be a “negatron,” and whatever you do, don’t “shoot the puppy,” “squeeze the sponge,” “pump and dump,” “punch the tree,” or take a “stall nap.” (Thanks to The Office Life website for its comprehensive jargon dictionary.)