Jargon
Monoxide Phobia is unwarranted
It is not Jargon Monoxide but unreasonable interest
rates, irrelevant regulations and excessive government interference rather than
providing a business-friendly eco-system that is killing most businesses.
I don’t think in the corporate world anyone, especially the
bosses or managers would go out of the way to put in efforts to learn merely to boast their
bombastic skill sets or their pedagogy. For businesses profits and targets are
a greater priority than prolixity involving pleonastic cant or galimatias.
I can take each sentence
cited in this write up and prove why every word used has its own relevance in
the present-day commerce.
If at all there are a few
instances of excessive verbiage, as in most trends in many
domains they have percolated from political leaders and religious
preachers.*1
Excessive LEFT WING
theoretical ideology and the malign cancerous WOKEISM driven self-appointed neo
socio-moral police in the media eco chambers, fanatic religious doctrine
promoters, Right Wing Cultural polices have created an atmosphere of
hypersensitivity which cherry picks any communication or statement or rips it
off from the relevant context, overreacts and activates outrage manufacturing
factories all of which have led to loss of sense of humour, lack of scientific
authenticity and lack of sensitivity to time tested value based traditions and
cultures as well.
All the above have forced any
medium of communication to be hyper cautious to be controversy free,
comprehensive and comprehensible, calibrated ( gender neutral, non-racist,
apolitical, secular - I have forgotten the meaning of this though)
diplomatically and politically correct, universally useable, relevant to the
context bla bla. This has made any medium of communication to become too
elaborate but ensure to avoid controversies, ambiguities, scope for excessive
scrutiny etc.
Besides, communication must
ensure there is no scope to perceive any hidden agenda based irrelevant
extrapolations and must not carry any load of undercurrent, overtones, ulterior
motives.
In these situations, more
nuanced expressions along with the necessity to drive home that the listeners
do understand the nuances becomes a priority and brevity an unaffordable
privilege. It is like elaborate Raga alapana and the performer too likes to enjoy
the art of packing as much nuanced expressions and use a range of
possible aspects or features rather than a dry command of this or that.
For example:- “We need more cash.” [ when the financial space has been declared
as ‘cashless economy’ -passed off well as a slogan and blindly parroted by many
when what it meant was ‘ physical currency [ notes/coins] free’. Similar goof
up like ‘social distancing’ [ already it has been growing in modern societies ]
when it ought to have been ‘ physical distancing’.
In corporate world things
are too competitive and with the enormous amount of emerging and new
technological developments happening almost every day brevity may be a
vulnerability as fear of possible scrutiny of failure in retrospect even
remotely leads to omissions in communication.
Communication in every
situation cannot be shrunk as time slot or space restrained advertisement
lingo.
Most of the legal language (
may sound too prosaic and lengthy as law cannot indulge in romantic lingo ) and
corporate communication is not mere hoarding lingo and cannot be construed as
senseless verbification and verbal justifications to alter the nature of thing/
attribute/ concept being verbalized but more to ensure avoid omissions.
When certain concepts or
attributes evolve ( like everything else) the expressions too make the
necessary adjustments and create a whole carapace of connotation to convey the
evolved state or add on multiple concomitant categories in expression.
At the same time if we delve
too deep into the etymology of words used and decide to merely stick on to the
denotation, we may be surprised to know these facts.
Once upon a time the following was true. Lengthy explanations are often a smoke screen that people hide behind. This
observation from Ray, a seventeenth-century English naturalist with a great
fondness for proverbs, may have inspired one of George Orwell’s best-known
lines: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively
to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
However, if we run
through a bunch of languages, we will notice that English has not only spread
its tentacles everywhere, but it has survived very healthily for various
reasons ranging from hyper brief hoarding language to very elaborate
explanatory notes.
Metaphorically
Modern English is defined as Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages
Canadian writer Mark Abley’s delightful 2003 book, Spoken Here: Travels
Among Threatened Languages:
Modern English
is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient,
huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals
in its eagerness to expand.
William Safire’s
terrific remark that “English is a stretch language; one size fits all.” As
good as the others are, though, they can’t match Abley’s inspired observation. What
it lacks in brevity it makes up in wit and originality. And, because it
attempts to illuminate one thing—English—by relating it to something that, at
first glance, couldn’t seem more dissimilar—Wal-Mart—it is a perfect metaphor.
In fact, I was surprised
this ‘Jargon Monoxide Phobic’ person has omitted to mention marketing
strategy that has to keep in mind the sensitivities of cross cultural, multi-
regional, multi-lingual variations [ cannot use the term differences-which
will be misconstrued as discriminatory].
If we walk through even many
of the European languages [leave alone the oriental languages] we would notice
too many pitfalls, traps, tormenting ways to express even ordinary things.
Among the oriental ones, Japanese have certain peculiarities.*2.
*1] Recently , at an AI
conference some leaders gave their wisdom on AI [ a new technology which like
any other technology has its own immense utilities and a few disadvantages due
to its important impact -disruptive in short] like the following it must be easily
accessible, affordable, open source, people centric, environment friendly and
labour friendly [ i.e. without causing employment displacements ] benefiting
the economy and society on the whole. [ every intention expressed is noble and
to be taken seriously, but how the f…. are we going to ask the technology to
ensure all that.
Haven’t android phones
displaced, if not fully, at least to a very great extent, clock, calendars,
cameras, telephones, post cards, calculators, typewriting machines [ these are
called legacy in commercial parlance].
*2] Few samples culled from some books
German :- In
areas such as philosophy and psychology, German culture has often
led the way, giving us ideas from Gestalt to Weltanschauung. German
philosophical literature is full of powerful and pithy sentences, such as German dramatist,
Gottold Lessing's famous dictum, "Niemand müss miissen," literally "No-one must'must.'" German
poetry, too, is among the most intense and
untranslatable in the world. In short, it seems that German thought and
language is an amazing mixture of technical precision and soulful
ineffability, which sparks off a rich creativity in concepts.
But there is at
least one basic and practical reason for German's neologistic
tendencies — its limitless capacity for creating new terms by joining a whole
lot of old words together. Words of this compound type can be richly
expressive, and here are some other untranslatable products of the imaginative German
mind.
Polish :- You
can say "cat" in Polish in at least five ways - kot, kotek,
koteczek, kotulek,
kotuleczek. Each word means
something quite different, and the meanings vary from
a reference to your relationship with the cat in question to describing its size.
Russian :- where Priya refers to too
distant a relationship.
Russian society,
perhaps because of its long experience with authoritarian politics and
grace-and-favour rule, we find some deeply entrenched characteristics. For
instance, levels and qualities of human relationships are richly developed,
even in comparison with other Slavic tongues. This wealth of words for
different kinds of relationships (in addition to kin) provides evidence of
Russian culture's interest in the area of human dealings with one another.
Roughly speaking,
relations are categorized by their "closeness" or "strength,"
perhaps also hinting at their trustworthiness. Drug is someone extremely close to
us, much more so than the English word "friend." Podruga, "female friend," refers to a bond less
powerful than drug but still stronger than
"friend," closer to "girlfriend" or "lover." Priyatel
or priyatelnitsa is
rather more distant and znakomy is still more distant, although closer than the
supposed English equivalent word, "acquaintance."
Swedish :- In
spoken form, Swedish is by far the easiest of the Nordic languages to follow.
Several words in Swedish sound the same as in English but have different
meanings. For example kokt in Swedish is pronounced "cooked," but specifically
means "boiled." When your Swedish waiter asks if you would like your
breakfast egg "cooked," he will be confused if you answer, "Yes please,
fried." Even more problematic is the Swedish worded. It is Pronounced "go,"
but it does not mean "go." Literally translated, it means "walk."
Finnish:- Rautatieasemakirjakauppa
is a fine example of the Finnish habit of joining words without articles or
prepositions. It becomes much easier to understand if split up:
Now we can see the
literal translation. Is it any clearer? It means, of course, the "railway
station bookshop." The fact that Finnish works so comfortably without
subjects gives the language a Taoist character. It is more concerned with being
than doing and more interested in the action than the actor.
