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    Jargon Unchained
    Jargon Unchained
    Jargon Unchained
    Ebook36 pages22 minutes

    Jargon Unchained

    By Len Guff

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    About this ebook

    ”To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.” - George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

    Jargon Unchained is a hater's guide, a book of how-not-to's, an anti-business manual for the disenfranchised office worker. And it's funny because it's true.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLen Guff
    Release dateNov 6, 2014
    ISBN9781310890703
    Jargon Unchained
    Author

    Len Guff

    Len Guff is just like you. He's worked in several industries. Telecoms, finance, media, catering. But it hasn’t enlightened him. It’s taught him that there isn’t a profession in this world that hasn't been tainted by the obfuscations of business jargon. The Jargonistas are out there and they're multiplying like bacteria in the Petri dish of office life. Len still works in an office, prepared to struggle on as his mother tongue crumbles around him, the only thing keeping him sane is the knowledge that only a third of his day will be infiltrated by the doublespeak that blights the collective consciousness.

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      Book preview

      Jargon Unchained - Len Guff

      Introduction

      A quick heads-up: this book will annoy you. It will annoy you because you’ll disagree with some of the words and phrases that have been deemed ‘jargon’. It will annoy you because you’ll see yourself in some of the scenarios and think, ‘I talk like that.’ But it will mainly annoy you because you’ll recognise, hopefully, how meaningless so much of it is, how businesses use and abuse the English language to obfuscate true meaning, how we hide behind mixed metaphors and neologisms. For starters, the first sentence of this paragraph contains a term that would have been derided for being jargon not that long ago.

      The first time I heard the term ‘heads-up’ (hyphenated or not, just as bad) was 2003, and I was writing code scripts for a large telecoms company. I remember laughing to my colleague about how silly it sounded. As if you need to look up to pay attention anyway. Now, midway through the second decade of the 21st century, it’s acceptable English. This is a theme that will be returned to again: the idea of change, and that the English language is alive, malleable and constantly redefining itself - as it should be.

      To do this properly I needed to find out the history of the various terms included, and what better way to do so than with Google Scholar. A free tool often used in citations for degrees and vivas, Google Scholar offered up (in most cases) the first recorded usage of a specific term and for the purposes of this short book performed the task admirably. In most cases these terms have been around much longer than you think, leading me to doubt my original assertion as to whether they could and would be classed as business jargon any longer. But for the context of this book only I could make that judgment, and

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