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 ecosystem 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 about 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 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; the malign, cancerous WOKEISM-driven, self-appointed neo-socio-moral police in the media, echo chambers, and fanatic religious doctrine
promoters; and RIGHT-WING cultural policies have created an atmosphere of
hypersensitivity that 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 humor, 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 hypercautious to be controversy-free,
comprehensive, and comprehensible; calibrated (gender-neutral, non-racist, apolitical, and secular—I have forgotten the meaning of this though);
diplomatically and politically correct; universally usable; relevant to the context; and bla bla. This has made any medium of communication 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 on irrelevant
extrapolations and must not carry any load of undercurrents, overtones, or ulterior
motives.
In these situations, more
nuanced expressions along with the necessity to drive home that the listeners
do understand the nuances become a priority, and brevity an unaffordable
privilege. It is like an elaborate Raga alapana, and the performer too likes to enjoy
the art of packing as many nuanced expressions and using 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 a ‘cashless economy’—passed off well as a slogan and blindly parroted by many
when what it meant was 'physical currency [notes/coins] free.' A similar goof-up, like ‘social distancing’ [it has already been growing in modern societies],
when it ought to have been 'physical distancing.'
In the 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 to a 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 the thing/attribute/concept being verbalized but more to ensure avoiding 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 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 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 also survived very healthily for various
reasons ranging from hyper-brief hoarding language to very elaborate
explanatory notes.
Metaphorically,
Modern English is defined as 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, and 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, and 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 that, 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 labor-friendly [i.e., without causing employment displacements], benefiting the economy and society as a 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, clocks, calendars,
cameras, telephones, postcards, calculators, and 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 Gotthold Lessing's famous dictum, "Niemand muss müssen," 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," and "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-favor rule, has 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," meaning "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 word. 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.
