7. Jargon

Whatever field of industry you end up writing for, sooner or later you will come up against jargon: a whole set of words and phrases that have either been misappropriated or completely made up by a group of users. Marketing types, for example, may be heard to utter phrases such as ‘above the line’, ‘agency-side’ or ‘marcomms’. Technology bods will talk about ‘platforms’, ‘interoperability’ and ‘resilience’. Jargon tends to be loved by those in the know because they are liable to believe it helps give them an air of informed superiority. For those outside this cosy industry circle, jargon usually comes across as meaningless waffle – which is why copywriters should try to avoid it at all costs. Jargon usually breaks down into made-up words and misused words. I will give an example of each to illustrate what you should look out for.

Made-up words

Managers are fond of taking nouns and turning them into verbs. Thus, to ‘provide an incentive’ becomes ‘incentivise’. Having come up with a completely new word, there is little to stop them going further; hence the process of ‘giving incentives’ becomes ‘incentivisation’. Such terms may impress the board but are unlikely to do much for the business’s communications generally. As mentioned above, audiences will tend to treat with suspicion any communication that is couched in terms they cannot understand easily. Filling a text with long-winded, obviously made-up words like ‘incentivisation’ is just asking for trouble.

Misused words

Every now and then an industry feels it does not have enough perfectly good words of its own and steals a word from elsewhere. A classic example of this, and one of my personal bugbears, is the word ‘solution’.

A quick search for this word on the reference site Dictionary.com reveals that, according to Webster’s, ‘solution’ means:

• 1.The act of separating the parts of any body, or the condition of undergoing a separation of parts; disruption; breach.
• 2.The act of solving, or the state of being solved; the disentanglement of any intricate problem or difficult question; explanation; clearing up; used especially in mathematics, either of the process of solving an equation or problem, or the result of the process.
• 3.The state of being dissolved or disintegrated; resolution; disintegration.
• 4.The act or process by which a body (whether solid, liquid, or gaseous) is absorbed into a liquid, and, remaining or becoming fluid, is diffused throughout the solvent; also, the product resulting from such absorption.
• 5.Release; deliverance; discharge.
• 6.(a) The termination of a disease; resolution. (b) A crisis. (c) A liquid medicine or preparation (usually aqueous) in which the solid ingredients are wholly soluble.

There is no mention here (or in any other standard dictionary) of the word ‘solution’ meaning anything to do with a collection of software and hardware systems put together by a technology company.

Yet take a look at any text from any high-tech firm and you will see it is littered with references to the ‘solutions’ it offers its clients. What they are talking about is probably best illustrated by another entry in Dictionary.com, from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, by Denis Howe:

Solution <jargon> A marketroid term for something he wants to sell you without bothering you with the often dizzying distinctions between hardware, software, services, applications, file formats, companies, brand names and operating systems; ‘Flash is a perfect image-streaming solution.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Um . . . about a thousand dollars.’

This insidious misuse of the word is so widespread that it has even been embraced by other industries (so, for example, cleaning services have become cleaning solutions) and incorporated into trading names (Bloggs & Co Cleaning Solutions).

Furthermore, people I have spoken to in technology companies are often genuinely surprised that anyone would not know what a ‘solution’ is in the context of computer systems, although they themselves are often stumped when pushed for a definition. The reality is that ‘solution’ is a non-word that does the industry no favours because it provides no information whatsoever on what businesses in the sector can offer to their clients.