I had a client tell me once that he had decided to retained my company for a computer job because, when he asked how fast an Internet connection he needed I answered, “You just have to make sure that you can blow as hard as your customers can suck.” He said that was the first thing a computer person ever told him that he could understand.
I sympathize. I recently inherited responsibility for an Information Technology department and now I'm receiving commercial emails with subjects like: “ERP for Growing Companies”, and “Best Practices for Managing 3PAR Thin Provisioning.”
I'm hardly a babe in the digital woods – but the subject lines of those emails are gobbledygook before my eyes. That's not to say that the content is worthless or incomprehensible. Computer technology is just one of the multitude of professions that use jargon that is a combination of verbal shorthand and shibboleth – it facilitates communication among the initiated while being incomprehensible to outsiders.
Unfortunately jargon also helps mask incompetence or laziness. An alarm should go off whenever someone says, “It's too complicated to explain to someone who doesn't have training in the field.”
When I was a journalist I heard that sort of thing a lot, but I was struck by the fact that I didn't hear anything of the sort from any of the group of Nobel Laureates or particle physicists I interviewed at a conference on sub-atomic physics, or for that matter from any of the scientists I spoke with who had done groundbreaking work in a particular field.
Albert Einstein famously said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
Most people feel that they have a stake in making other people believe that what they do is difficult and requires a lot of skill and intelligence. The irony is that, as a rule, the people with the most knowledge, skill and intelligence, make what they're doing look easy.
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