I am proud to consider you a friend. Thank you for thinking of me in the same light.

Yours,

Peter

I don’t want to come off to my customers- nor my co-workers- as rude and obnoxious.

I posted on this a few weeks back: http://cjack.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/corporatespeak-is-hurting-you-and-your-company/

* as someone above alluded to, jargon is a tribal affiliation. As in, we all speak the same (twisted, hackneyed) language and those other people don’t. Being fluent in Jargonese is a critical skill when dealing with pompous asses who question your authority and value tribal loyalty. It’s a way to say We Are Academics or We are Engineers, and everyone else is different from us. Or, We Are Special.

* ‘low hanging fruit’ in my world = ‘let’s only deal with people we already know and make no effort to extend our work beyond my [the boss’s] personal network’.

* touching base for me is really that. I’m changing jobs and I’m fervently updating my LinkedIn connections to make sure that I don’t lose touch with the people I like/respect. I’ve been dropping emails to associates at my new institution to say hi. Hmmm, maybe I do want something (a beer)?

Personally, my problem is with people who create new words. We need to go “ideate” some more. I heard that in a meeting and waited for everyone to laugh…they didn’t…and they used it again and again. Ugh. That kind of thing annoys me. But then again, part of team building is developing your own norms and even language…it is not per se a bad thing. The people who complain about these things are usually complaining because they feel left out of the “inner circle.” I think, to that extent, getting all fired up about jargon can be self-defeating.

Jargon’s flaw is its vagueness. A phrase may not mean the same thing to different people, resulting in misunderstandings. And a speaker using jargon isn’t letting you know whether *they* know what they’re talking about.