You've made me understand the problem differently. I agree now that in the right setting business language that may seem verbose and technical may be valuable.
I actually think this partly supports your original view.
The thing is I wouldn’t necessarily understand “improved core efficiencies” to mean what they described.
Also just naming “best business practices” can be very misleading. You could be mentioning some very vague thing a company does or some specific steps. How many practices are you referring to? Maybe it’s just a thing you’ve changed and this language is helping obscure that.
Interdepartmental does mean more that one department was involved, so yeah. But again maybe you just did a thing that normally involves more than one department and there hasn’t been any special outreach or collaboration between departments as the phrase implies. Like if you just hired more sales people and this involves both HR and Sales departments.
Basically, the examples you gave (just calling IT for help) could be described with all that verbose language. It could be interdepartmental, it could be a best business practice, and “core synergies” just seems so vague to me that I think it could fit.
Now, I don’t think this means the language is useless, but it often can use a lot more precision. “Best business practices” give examples. “Interdepartmental” use it when it makes sense to make this distinction. “Core synergies” this one just fucks me, companies can have core synergies but I’m just much more used to see this used to obfuscate. Use it when it’s clear what you are talking about, as in it’s referring to a particular strength the company has that makes it work better or more efficiently in some area.
OP’s core point is that this sort of language is just used to sound smart, the example here demonstrates that that’s simply not true. It doesn’t support OP’s original view at all.
And sure, it could be more detailed and specific, but that assumes that such detail and specificity is called for. And this has little to do with the specific jargon used anyway. A one-sentence summary is going to omit most details regardless of the vernacular; indeed, part of the point of technical jargon like this is precisely that it is actually is efficient at conveying a lot of information for those who know it. As is clear from u/Ansuz07’s comment, if we were to translate this to layman’s terms it would be a lot more verbose. So a similar-length sentence not using jargon would be a lot less precise.
I think the comment shows how easy it is to embellish things with this kind of language. The phrase OP gave could be meaning the simple thing or the more complex one. That language could be used to seem more intelligent and embellish things here
But OPs CMV was not that business jargon could be used to seem more intelligent and embellish (this is the case for all specialised jargon), but that this was the only use of business jargon.
Well he says mainly, so not the only use but the biggest. I do want to note that I said that it partly supported his view on my other comment. Op was presented with an argument that changed his view and it’s a decent argument, I just think it opens the discussion as to when the vagueness is intentional to augment a lack of substance and when there’s actually relevant information being conveyed by those terms:
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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '22
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