That's proper corporate speak, not so much office jargon. One note: to table in the UK means to put it to vote/address, rather than "put it under the rug"
In Robert's Rules (of Parliament Procedure), which are kind of the "base level" in US corporate politics, "to table" means to "send [back] to committee" in part coming from the idea of physically collecting all the debate notes so far and setting them aside on a table for the committee to collect to take to their next meeting in order to (try to) address concerns.
In Robert's Rules to address something is to "motion" it, with "call to vote" being a common sub-type of a motion to make. (Generally addressed to "the chair" of the meeting, or asking for wider debate from "the floor", so sometimes something might be "chaired" or "floored" to imply a vote/address, but usually "motion".)
The default vote in Robert's Rules is a show of hands or a verbal "aye"/"nay"/"abstain". It takes extra work to motion for a paper or ballot vote. I'm curious if the UK jargon for "table" is as much a difference/switch in that default among UK parliamentary procedure? More paper votes would involve more tables, if that were the case, so that would maybe explain things.
This is incredible. The quality of the writing is on another level, it's not just about throwing corporate jargon but weaving it through a nicely written piece. Thank you for sharing, looking forward to reading more comments from you.
I have a long-time friend who, after years in fintech, now sometimes speaks this way unironically in non-work situations. I mean, I still think he's a good guy overall but when he recommends the DND party splits up to maximize ROI on a spell rather than just say "let's split up", it does make me cringe.
It's actually a useful device when you like to pull an analogy. Instead of explaining the whole idea, you throw a jargon and everyone constructs the rest in their head and understand it and know how to work with it. The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions, so it works as a rails and compression for ideas.
These are some effects of a jargon but the reason for its existence is precision. You learn it in an institution and then you are on the same page and there's no ambiguity over its meaning. Using jargon with a layperson is useless and could be stupid or pretentious.
In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.
I don't know why is this obsession over jargon. I know the cliche, it's not true at all except when you misuse it. Maybe can be used as part of a fraud or some power move or something like that but its intended use case is a shortcut to predefined ideas. It may have side effects but that doesn't mean that those side effects are the reason to exist.
I am making an empirical statement. The majority of its actual use in life is to achieve social/political ends, not to improve communication. If you want to say the majority of its use is misuse, fine. But the misuse is intentional.
I disagree entirely, jargon use is to help us from keeping defining things so we can move on to the next problem. How do you even use "unsprung weight" or "distributed cache" for social or political ends? Maybe it can be used at some cringe encounter with layperson but that's not at all what jargon is used for.
Something like "distributed cache" is valid jargon. I already conceded that it can be useful. But the majority of it (by raw numbers) is the kind of stuff of the OP is lampooning -- business and office jargon. Of course there is plenty of scientific and mathematical jargon that's legitimate shorthand.
Even there, however, the line blurs. That is, you have terms with legitimate use that were poorly chosen. Sometimes the poor choice is historical accident, but often it's motivated by a desire to sound more impressive and complicated that it is. Something like "applicative functor" might fall into this category.
I absolutely agree that some people use jargon as a gatekeeping device or an in-group detector, and that's lame.
But jargon does have value in communication where you know the person you're talking to understands it at the level you do. Jargon, when used well, can let you be simultaneously more precise and more terse.
Think about times you've sent email or even just chat messages to different professional audiences. You're probably going to use different language when talking to a manager vs. a sales person vs. an engineer. I'm not talking about level of formality; the actual language you use to describe the topic at hand will change. Some of that will be a matter of the level of detail you provide, but some of it will likely include jargon (when you're conversing with someone in the same "group" as you), and you might not even realize it.
That's good when you explain something technical to a layman, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about explaining non-technical issue to a technical person using jargon for analogy.
For example you can use P2P to explain how some gossip spread or you can say that your relationship with SO is like UDP recently.
It's not clearer, it's deeper. It implies a state and creates an image in the listeners mind. You can throw it casually when explaining something and your audience now has an image in their head so you can explain the actual thing you are after.
Jargons are shortcuts to pre-agreed ideas. Just a tool.
It means that you are not the intended audience because you know too much or too little about UDP.
Once I had a physicist friend freak out over my use of "exponential" to loosely explain something because he instantly began thinking about edge cases and obviously using "logarithmic" would have been more precise. We were not on the same page with the jargon, but then again I guess it requires social skills too so that you can pick where the analogy starts and ends.
My biggest pet peeve is when people use "exponential" to describe an increase defined by two points (i.e. "Americans are anticipated to consume exponentially more cookies in 2025 than they did in 2024"). Fully meaningless.
I agree: it's absolutely an in-group joke. Maybe not joke, but a cutesy in-group way of expressing something.
Certainly someone who gets it will, well, get it. But in general it seems like a lot of effort in most cases to gauge whether or not the recipient will understand at the level you hope. Even the UDP example could be misunderstood by someone who is well-versed. Unreliable? A good low-level thing to build stuff on top of? These are both plausible meanings, but would convey very different things.
I mean, if you describe a relationship in terms of a protocol, sure, you're giving an interesting signal about the relationship, but probably not what you intended to say.
> If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?
It's not. Well, if the person you're talking to happens to get the intended meaning immediately, it's a cute in-joke. To me, that's the only real (dubious) benefit.
There is no single "just simply" though. All communication is based on an (inherently fallible) estimate of the recipient's mental-state, priorities, and knowledge-base.
For example, "I would like one head of lettuce" is a kind of jargon-lite for "I would like one portion of the fully-grown plant known as lettuce which is found above-ground as a connected unit in nature." Which one leads to a "simpler" exchange will depend on your assumptions about the recipient.
Except that "one head of lettuce" is a widely-known "measure" that most people are going to understand.
Most of this business-speak jargon is incomprehensible to people who haven't heard it before in the workplace. It seems "normal" to people like us here on HN because most of us have interacted with these sorts of business types (or are even one of them), but I would guess that most of the people who know what a head of lettuce represents would have no idea what ROI or noun-form "solve" means.
I never said the marriage satire was normal. (Although, in that fictional world, those two fictional people seem to be surprisingly satisfied with their choices of language.)
Just that "simple" is deceptive, non-universal, and sometimes contradictory.
Office jargon in particular fulfills a social signalling role rather than a clear communication role. It's intended to tell upper management: "I'm one of you guys, please look kindly upon me and maybe promote me!" But there's a dynamic similar to that of "U" English vs. "non-U English"[0], as upper management is more likely to say things like "Just get the fucking thing shipped. Our business depends on it."
[0] It turns out that in England, upper-class aspirants are likely to use posher phrases and idioms than actual upper-class people, as the latter are aware of their own and others' social status and have no need for verbal affectations to communicate it. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Jargon is everywhere but office jargon is its own sub genre.
For office jargon, it's maybe not a practical matter, but I could see a friend being a little put off by someone speaking in office jargon to them. Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
IMHO office jargon is just as useful but because it's not technical its harder to adjust.
>Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
That's one of it's functions. Instead of going over each time that the thing happening isn't personal and shouldn't be taken as such, you can utilize the jargon to keep it clean. After all, it's just a job where everyone tries to play their role to produce something. It hurts much more badly if you confuse the office work for a social interaction and things don't pan out at some point.
it only works with other white collar people who have heard the same jargon, normal people in the real world just won't understand what you're saying, so it's just bad communication
Except that with e.g. technical jargon, the audience is important because non-technical people don’t have the training/experience to understand what’s being said.
With office jargon, I understand everything being said, but the majority of it could be stated more simply and clearly without the use of it. This type of jargon is a social signaling tool, not a useful shortcut or simplification (again, most of the time). It’s also harder to parse for non-native speakers of English.
GARY: Hey Cindy, remember last week when we were debugging that system design issue?
CINDY: Yeah, we got some pretty elegant solutions out of that sprint.
GARY: Exactly. That got me thinking: our relationship feels like a system that’s not just functional—it’s optimized.
CINDY: Oh? I’d like to hear your use case for that.
GARY: Well, I’ve run some simulations, and the output is consistent. You’re my primary key, Cindy. The stability and scalability of our relationship are off the charts.
CINDY: That’s a strong endorsement, Gary. I’ve been analyzing our feedback loops, and I feel the same way. You’ve really reduced my latency and maximized my throughput.
GARY: So I figured it’s time to push to production. In addition to all the features we’ve developed, I’d like to add one more. (He takes a knee and pulls out a ring.) Cindy, will you marry me?
CINDY: I will, Gary! This takes our architecture to the next level.
GARY: Marriage is a big commit, but I think we’ve got the bandwidth to make it work.
CINDY: Absolutely. But we need to stay agile, especially during our onboarding phase.
GARY: Agreed. I’ll make sure to stay in sync during our sprints.
CINDY: Good. Because I have one non-negotiable: we need to maintain a clean codebase.
GARY: Let’s unpack that.
CINDY: My last relationship had too many tech debts. Every time I tried to refactor, there was pushback. It was impossible to iterate.
GARY: Sounds like a monolithic mess.
CINDY: It was. But with you, it’s different. You’re modular, efficient, and your logic is rock-solid. I just want to make sure we keep things lightweight and maintainable.
GARY: I couldn’t agree more. We’ll keep our dependencies up-to-date and document everything thoroughly.
CINDY: Perfect. Let’s set up a shared repository to start planning our roadmap.
GARY: Done. I’ll draft an RFC tonight so we can align on our deliverables.
CINDY: Great. Just flag me if you hit any blockers.
GARY: Will do. And Cindy? Thank you for being my forever stack overflow.
CINDY: And thank you for being the solution to all my edge cases.
C'mon, don't just paste the content into the comments. The site doesn't have a paywall and from what I can see with a fresh browser window without ad blocker turned on there's no adverts aside from a request for subscriptions / becoming a patron.
You joke, but I know an actual couple that has a “family” Jira instance. They have tickets for household todo items like “Paint fence”.
I’m not sure about performance reporting but I think overall velocity has gone down despite their team size growing in recent years. I think the new members aren’t contributing much yet in the way of story points.
I worked with a sysadmin that did this for his kids, and even moved chore assignments around automatically based on grades (which he scraped from some school portal). Get a D and you'll have to do your sister's chores!
My wife and I use Trello for stuff like this. Though the main use case is as the world's most reliable checklist-syncing program for grocery shopping. The task tracking is also nice
It's funny, but it sounds more like corporate/management speak than office jargon.
Employees, when no managers are present, seldom talk to each other like this. Sometimes, the way we actually speak to each other, would get us fired if someone from management was eavesdropping.
I worked at a place where line employees talked like this to each other all the time. It was maddening. In particular, whenever the word "use" might be used, everybody at this company used the word "leverage" instead. They leveraged a piece of toilet paper to wipe their ass with. Madness! I felt like I was from space, like, am I the only one who sees how silly this is?
But again, this sort of jargon serves a social signalling function. It's metacommunication, not first-order communication. It's intended to suggest "I'm a true and honest member of the business class and should be taken seriously in business affairs."
247 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadIn Robert's Rules to address something is to "motion" it, with "call to vote" being a common sub-type of a motion to make. (Generally addressed to "the chair" of the meeting, or asking for wider debate from "the floor", so sometimes something might be "chaired" or "floored" to imply a vote/address, but usually "motion".)
The default vote in Robert's Rules is a show of hands or a verbal "aye"/"nay"/"abstain". It takes extra work to motion for a paper or ballot vote. I'm curious if the UK jargon for "table" is as much a difference/switch in that default among UK parliamentary procedure? More paper votes would involve more tables, if that were the case, so that would maybe explain things.
>As 6:30 P.M. rolled around, she felt sick in the pit of her stomach, like when she looked at a sentence that didn’t contain an acronym.
> OPERATOR: O.K., Robert, you understand that what you just described isn’t really lunch, right?
> ROBERT: It is lunch. When there are no rules, it is lunch, Cherise!
> OPERATOR: Did you at any point dip the green peppers in the peach yogurt?
> ROBERT: Probably. Sorry.
Reminds me of that Bloodhound Gang song
Regards, AA
This is such a magnificent phrase and I don't think it will ever get enough credit
Well, not always. Per Webster:
1: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
2: obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words
It would be great if it were only (1) but I’d often (2)
Wherever 1 or 2 applies just depends on how used you're to the usage of said jargon.
In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.
Even there, however, the line blurs. That is, you have terms with legitimate use that were poorly chosen. Sometimes the poor choice is historical accident, but often it's motivated by a desire to sound more impressive and complicated that it is. Something like "applicative functor" might fall into this category.
But jargon does have value in communication where you know the person you're talking to understands it at the level you do. Jargon, when used well, can let you be simultaneously more precise and more terse.
Think about times you've sent email or even just chat messages to different professional audiences. You're probably going to use different language when talking to a manager vs. a sales person vs. an engineer. I'm not talking about level of formality; the actual language you use to describe the topic at hand will change. Some of that will be a matter of the level of detail you provide, but some of it will likely include jargon (when you're conversing with someone in the same "group" as you), and you might not even realize it.
Just simply state what you mean. Let the other person ask questions if they need clarification.
For example you can use P2P to explain how some gossip spread or you can say that your relationship with SO is like UDP recently.
Jargons are shortcuts to pre-agreed ideas. Just a tool.
Once I had a physicist friend freak out over my use of "exponential" to loosely explain something because he instantly began thinking about edge cases and obviously using "logarithmic" would have been more precise. We were not on the same page with the jargon, but then again I guess it requires social skills too so that you can pick where the analogy starts and ends.
Certainly someone who gets it will, well, get it. But in general it seems like a lot of effort in most cases to gauge whether or not the recipient will understand at the level you hope. Even the UDP example could be misunderstood by someone who is well-versed. Unreliable? A good low-level thing to build stuff on top of? These are both plausible meanings, but would convey very different things.
Better to just use clear language.
"Hmm udp, so ...unreliable and...hmm...but high throughput?...hm, good to build stuff on top of?"
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, yet I know exactly what udp is.
If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?
Also, you use it in context. The jargon becomes illustrative for the analogy, not precise definition. After all, human can't have UDP connection.
It's not. Well, if the person you're talking to happens to get the intended meaning immediately, it's a cute in-joke. To me, that's the only real (dubious) benefit.
For example, "I would like one head of lettuce" is a kind of jargon-lite for "I would like one portion of the fully-grown plant known as lettuce which is found above-ground as a connected unit in nature." Which one leads to a "simpler" exchange will depend on your assumptions about the recipient.
Most of this business-speak jargon is incomprehensible to people who haven't heard it before in the workplace. It seems "normal" to people like us here on HN because most of us have interacted with these sorts of business types (or are even one of them), but I would guess that most of the people who know what a head of lettuce represents would have no idea what ROI or noun-form "solve" means.
Just that "simple" is deceptive, non-universal, and sometimes contradictory.
[0] It turns out that in England, upper-class aspirants are likely to use posher phrases and idioms than actual upper-class people, as the latter are aware of their own and others' social status and have no need for verbal affectations to communicate it. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
For office jargon, it's maybe not a practical matter, but I could see a friend being a little put off by someone speaking in office jargon to them. Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
Consider Cockney Rhyming Slang, which is intended to be insider-only speech.
Consider the rise and then mass-adoption of Valley Girl.
>Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
That's one of it's functions. Instead of going over each time that the thing happening isn't personal and shouldn't be taken as such, you can utilize the jargon to keep it clean. After all, it's just a job where everyone tries to play their role to produce something. It hurts much more badly if you confuse the office work for a social interaction and things don't pan out at some point.
With office jargon, I understand everything being said, but the majority of it could be stated more simply and clearly without the use of it. This type of jargon is a social signaling tool, not a useful shortcut or simplification (again, most of the time). It’s also harder to parse for non-native speakers of English.
Sorry if it's offensive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yGUSRdNG4
For those not familiar / context, NewsRadio, Negotiation, S2E8 1995:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660208/quotes/>
<https://breezewiki.pussthecat.org/newsradio/wiki/Negotiation>
CINDY: Yeah, we got some pretty elegant solutions out of that sprint.
GARY: Exactly. That got me thinking: our relationship feels like a system that’s not just functional—it’s optimized.
CINDY: Oh? I’d like to hear your use case for that.
GARY: Well, I’ve run some simulations, and the output is consistent. You’re my primary key, Cindy. The stability and scalability of our relationship are off the charts.
CINDY: That’s a strong endorsement, Gary. I’ve been analyzing our feedback loops, and I feel the same way. You’ve really reduced my latency and maximized my throughput.
GARY: So I figured it’s time to push to production. In addition to all the features we’ve developed, I’d like to add one more. (He takes a knee and pulls out a ring.) Cindy, will you marry me?
CINDY: I will, Gary! This takes our architecture to the next level.
GARY: Marriage is a big commit, but I think we’ve got the bandwidth to make it work.
CINDY: Absolutely. But we need to stay agile, especially during our onboarding phase.
GARY: Agreed. I’ll make sure to stay in sync during our sprints.
CINDY: Good. Because I have one non-negotiable: we need to maintain a clean codebase.
GARY: Let’s unpack that.
CINDY: My last relationship had too many tech debts. Every time I tried to refactor, there was pushback. It was impossible to iterate.
GARY: Sounds like a monolithic mess.
CINDY: It was. But with you, it’s different. You’re modular, efficient, and your logic is rock-solid. I just want to make sure we keep things lightweight and maintainable.
GARY: I couldn’t agree more. We’ll keep our dependencies up-to-date and document everything thoroughly.
CINDY: Perfect. Let’s set up a shared repository to start planning our roadmap.
GARY: Done. I’ll draft an RFC tonight so we can align on our deliverables.
CINDY: Great. Just flag me if you hit any blockers.
GARY: Will do. And Cindy? Thank you for being my forever stack overflow.
CINDY: And thank you for being the solution to all my edge cases.
I’m not sure about performance reporting but I think overall velocity has gone down despite their team size growing in recent years. I think the new members aren’t contributing much yet in the way of story points.
https://youtu.be/1RAMRukKqQg?si=CrRUbA3Ktsm5v7Kk
Another is the one about Omega Star (whose team still haven't got their shit together and implemented ISO dates like they said they would!).
Employees, when no managers are present, seldom talk to each other like this. Sometimes, the way we actually speak to each other, would get us fired if someone from management was eavesdropping.
But again, this sort of jargon serves a social signalling function. It's metacommunication, not first-order communication. It's intended to suggest "I'm a true and honest member of the business class and should be taken seriously in business affairs."
> true and honest
I agree wholeheartedly.