Buzzwords

tl;dr - I'm posting a new buzzword every week until I've run out of words, which probably won't happen as long as I work in an office. Look at the bottom of the post.

In most industries there are specialized terms that naturally evolve. In show business, the "green room" is a room where people sit when they aren't required on stage. That term probably came to be because describing it every time you want to mention it takes too long. In electronics, to "fab" a circuit is to fabricate a printed circuit board of the circuit. I'm sure there are a lot of companies that have their own set of terms as well.

Languages tend to use short words for very common things. Larger words are for things that don't come up as often. Everyone has mentioned the word "tree" before, but not everyone has needed to say "deoxyribonucleic acid." When it started becoming a more common term, it was shortened to "DNA."

Larger words are also used to express a more exact form of a shorter word. "Happy" is generic. "Ecstatic" is extremely happy.

Somehow, big words became a sign of "intelligence." I use the quotes because most of the truly intelligent people I know don't use gigantic words. What I have noticed, however, is that when people use big words when they really aren't needed, they are usually trying to hide that they don't know much but want to appear knowledgeable. This is most noticeable in people who went to school for management, become in charge of a project, and have no idea about any of the effort that goes in to a project. The same is true about people who have been in management a long time without keeping their skills up to date.

So, this is my problem with buzzwords: they mean nothing. They take the place of smaller words in an attempt to get people to Wow! people. It works, too, but not always as expected. I've seen upper management presentations that the presenter said entire paragraphs that had no actual content in them what-so-ever. I was blown away at the amount of skill and time went into trying make something that could have been fit into an emailed memo into a 1.5 hour presentation.

I've been keeping a list. I have a perl script I wrote that generates Bingo cards based on buzzwords. I'll post that eventually.

In an effort to spice up My War On Pants, I've decided to start posting one buzzword every week. So far, I tend to write a post every two weeks, and my posts tend to be long. I'm hoping that this idea will help me create more posts that are shorter. I know not everyone want to read long posts, and long posts take my a long time to write. Hopefully, I won't rant so much for each word, but we all know that's bound to happen.

Edit (Mar 09, 2010): A few rearrangements happened in my life recently.I can't commit to a weekly basis, but I will still be posting these entries.

Edit (Jul 26, 2010): I been working with a different group of people at work for the past few months. Now, rather than raging at buzzwords, I can laugh now. It's different now that I don't hear them every few seconds throughout the entirety of my workday. I'll post these when I'm sitting around trying to kill time, but that barely happens nowadays.