Drill down, Vesting period, Fox News, Matrix
management, Payroll orphans, Right sized, Significant
Rigor.
Love them, hate them, but you can never
ignore them? Can you? The triumphant smile on the face of every Jargoneer is
not unknown to us. For him a speech
isn’t complete if he fails to take aback the listeners by his mind blowing
vocabulary.
When the phrase “provide details” makes more sense than “break it down”, or when the word “reduce” makes more sense than the phrase
“clamp down” , then, why are we
running behind these gimmicks? Are we forgetting the sole purpose of all the
communication theories developed over time?
The question is; couldn’t the language be a
lot simpler without them. It’s true that scientific and technical terms cannot be
moulded in lay man’s language, but what about jargons in management? In a field
where the interpersonal communication is given so much importance; why end up
in a verbal diarrhea?
Let us try to observe the evolution of a
Jargoneer through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The Jargoneer like most of us would start off
by using the language for his or her existence. This is the early stage of
evolution where he somehow struggles out of the maze in good life. Then the
situation will get little more complex where language is used for his safety
(As a defense) rather than for meager survival. Here the language becomes a
tool and helps him to win the verbal combat over others. Then comes the phase
when he falls in love with the language. Language becomes his friend, family
and moreover something, that he
loves to be with. Love gives way to esteem
and language becomes his confidence. He is respected for his eloquence. Then
esteem gives way to the most dangerous form of them all, self actualization,
where neither he gets to know what he speaks nor do we. Where, his or her
articulacy gets gibberish. At least they sound like gibberish. Here the sender
sends the information but there would not be any meaningful decryption at the receiver’s
end and a feedback is usually numb. The purpose of communication gets tampered in
due course and we will never get to know what he really meant to say at the
first place. In short, communication gets jarred and the listener gets gunned.
Now what the listener would have in front of him is none other than the jargoned communication.
