Office culture has for decades been blighted by jargon that has replaced perfectly usable words and phrases in English. The same can’t be said of office jargon, though. Why is office jargon problematic?Įach technical word or phrase that becomes jargon comes into existence because the object or concept being described was specifically important enough to deserve one. The company wasn’t successful, however, and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. Google campaigned for a long time to try to stop people from using “Google” as a slang term to describe searching the web, particularly when the Google search engine wasn’t being used. You also may confuse and alienate consumers and colleagues. Although it may be tempting to appropriate a buzzy word and countless marketing campaigns have tried to capitalize on the popularity of “Bluetooth” in recent years, you risk showing your ignorance when you use jargon incorrectly. When you use a term inaccurately, as many do with Bluetooth, it doesn’t make you look smarter.
#BUSINESS LINGO DICTIONARY BLUETOOTH#
However, among those outside the tech world today, Bluetooth is often wrongly used to describe any technology that works similarly, such as near-field communication (NFC) or Zigbee. IT professionals speaking to one another would understand what is meant by the term. Bluetooth is a specific, patented form of technology that transmits data wirelessly over up to 100 meters using ultrahigh-frequency radio waves in the 2.402 GHz to 2.48 GHz spectrum. The problem is that it rarely keeps the same meaning once it’s been set free. However, every now and again, such terminology breaks out of its original user group and into the wider public. The risks of using technical jargon in nontech settingsĪs the above example shows, it’s logical for your tech-focused employees to use technical jargon as they go about their everyday work. They’re doing this to see how vulnerable to attack their client is, and they’ll then share the results of the test with an audience designated by one of four colors. Because of their technical knowledge, they should know what the words mean.įor example, experts in the field of cybersecurity might use the phrase “penetration testing” to describe the activities of their co-workers during a “red team exercise” that is subject to the “traffic light protocol.” For them, that’s a much shorter way of saying that a designated team of cybersecurity professionals is intentionally trying to break into a client’s computer network as part of a risk assessment. It makes ideal sense for your IT team members to communicate with one another in technical jargon. Technical jargon is a term used to describe terminology that can only be comprehended by those with a technical background. Moreover, it is different from slang in that slang is an informal use of language while jargon is a collection of terms and phrases that can only be understood by certain groups of people. Typically, it involves the use of words and phrases that are otherwise meaningless when taken out of context.
Rather than using ordinary, easy-to-grasp words that can be understood quickly by everyone, jargon is a type of shorthand that is used to simplify communications among certain groups.
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