The Jargon Man

If you are in IT you must have heard this particular word "Jargon" many times. Jargons are also known as buzzwords. For beginners
this is the meaning of Jargon from dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jargon)

"
confused unintelligible language or a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect ....."

another explanation from same site

"
obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words"

Usually jargons are the words or term used by people working in a particular field or industry. Its assumed that people working in the same ( specific) field must be aware of these terminologies.

I guess you might have known by now what exactly a "Jargon" means. Its any of those words which is hard to understand or make sense of , even for any person belonging to the same industry. These words are extermely ( almost impossible) for a layman to understand.

In a nutshell, making sense of a Jargon is :

 Extermely difficult for some people.
 Almost impossible for rest of the people.


So why do people use jargons afer all ?, lets rest this discussion for a while and try to throw some light on IT ( information technology) field first. IT is relatively a new field compared to other fields such as manufacturing, finance etc. This field is full of meaningless, confusing, nonsensical jargons used by people who are either too intelligent or too dumb. The overuse of jargons in IT fields have reduced the importance of these words and made them "Technobabble". The primary function of technobabble (from wikipedia) is to obscure the truth of a situation by overdressing the words and concepts.Technobabble (a portmanteau of technology and babble) is a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords and highly esoteric language to give an impression of plausibility through mystification, misdirection, and obfuscation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technobabble). It field is full of these technobabble. If you are in IT industry you must have heard tons and tons of these words, if not please google for "IT jargon" , there are sites faithfully dedicated to these words.Some of the statments with jargons can be quite funny an example ,

We reduced the bugs after we started using SOAP.



Now lets answer our previous question , why do people really use jargons or technobabbles ?

Here is the answer from wikipedia.

Authors and others who wish to convey a feeling of technical sophistication may write or talk in technobabble. They may use the jargon without considering what it actually means in order to give an impression that they know things that their readers or listeners do not. However, if the jargon is decoded it becomes apparent that the originator does not really understand what has been said or is deliberately being unclear. When used in this way, technobabble is considered pretentious and often unacceptable. If used inappropriately even novice listeners can often detect that nonsense is being spouted forth.

Actually one of the problems blocking SOA adoption in companies was that when the architects and developers start talking in jargon, they lost the business executives and managers in the blur of XML, WSDL, SOAP and UDDI (http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1191671,00.html).

You will definetly have one or more than one jargon man in your team. The primary aim of this jargon man is to capture the free flowing jargons in the atmosphere and release it on unsuspecting , so-called-ignorant listeners. They do this to show their techical superiorty and hide the lack of knowledge on that particular topic.
Jargon man can be found any where , during meetings , during presentations , during interviews etc. A misconception people have is as they start growing in a particular field their dictionary of filthy, confusing jargons should also grow. So as typicall a lead or a manager would could potential throw more jargons than a tiny developer or a programmer.

Having a jargon man could be very injurious for a team or a customer. Team mates of this jargon man could suffer from inferiorty complex since the manager of this team would promote the jargon man. On the other hand a company might loose buiness by making a customer meet the jargon man since this would leave the customer confused. So if you have a jargon man in your team , the best way to deal with him would be to kick him out till he changes his dictionary.