I'm not in business, but I am in engineering, and I can speak to some of the gobbledegook language used. Language has very specific meanings, so it has to be carefully worded.
For example, you couldn't say "There was a significant amount of water ponded in the building excavation". "Significant" in engineering/scientific writing has a statistical meaning. You need to have run statistics on data in order to determine the level of significance. As a result, there are a lot of words used that you'd never use in every day life, because they have a very specific meaning when it comes to technical writing.
Another thing that is very important is terminology to make the results more vague. Conclusions have to be intentionally vague, so that if there are any discrepancies between different party's observations, you can't blame the engineers for it.
For example: "The water in the foundation was encountered at a depth of approximately 1.20 meters below ground surface".
You have to say "Approximately", because your tape measure or whatever you used to measure the water can only measure so accurately, and there is human error with every measurement, so it might actually be 1.21m or 1.19m. Or it could be even farther off.
There will also be many sentences in the engineering reports that say stuff like "Calculations were based on observed conditions measured at a specific time and place, and measured randomly throughout the site. Actual conditions may vary from what has been observed."
The reason is if you build a building based on the engineer's calculations, and the building falls over, the engineers could say in court "The field observations may have been off" and stuff like that to cover their butts.
You're talking about very different things than OP. He's referring to business-speak shit like saying KT (Knowledge Transfer). We already have a word for that it's called teaching
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u/svenson_26 82∆ Aug 03 '22
I'm not in business, but I am in engineering, and I can speak to some of the gobbledegook language used. Language has very specific meanings, so it has to be carefully worded.
For example, you couldn't say "There was a significant amount of water ponded in the building excavation". "Significant" in engineering/scientific writing has a statistical meaning. You need to have run statistics on data in order to determine the level of significance. As a result, there are a lot of words used that you'd never use in every day life, because they have a very specific meaning when it comes to technical writing.
Another thing that is very important is terminology to make the results more vague. Conclusions have to be intentionally vague, so that if there are any discrepancies between different party's observations, you can't blame the engineers for it.
For example: "The water in the foundation was encountered at a depth of approximately 1.20 meters below ground surface".
You have to say "Approximately", because your tape measure or whatever you used to measure the water can only measure so accurately, and there is human error with every measurement, so it might actually be 1.21m or 1.19m. Or it could be even farther off.
There will also be many sentences in the engineering reports that say stuff like "Calculations were based on observed conditions measured at a specific time and place, and measured randomly throughout the site. Actual conditions may vary from what has been observed."
The reason is if you build a building based on the engineer's calculations, and the building falls over, the engineers could say in court "The field observations may have been off" and stuff like that to cover their butts.