Even in light of "1984", we would be better served by reducing our bloated vocabularies than by augmenting them. Each person introducing a new bit of jargon is obliged to condemn two existing terms that can be demonstrated to make us less intelligent with each use.
I am not proposing a new term, but I will nominate some candidates for the memory hole, to prime the pump.
Let us begin with "currently". In every context of its use I have encountered this year, simply leaving it out would have improved the sentence.
Now consider, "going forward". Again, leaving it out appears to improve almost any conceivable sentence. Judging from its typical use in management memos (e.g. as posted on f---edcompany.com), its true meaning is "the following statement is false: ...". This expression serves a useful function, once decoded, but the reader would be better served by omitting the entire sentence.
I hereby extend permission to pour the entire remaining contents of any accessible beverage container into the lap of anyone who heard to use any form of the word "blog" in conversation.
Be warned that using the expression "heightened security" is now grounds for having an e-mail sent to whitehouse.gov, apparently from you, and threatening detailed bodily harm to its (putative) President.
We welcome additional nominations.
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." -- Mark Twain
Hmmmmm.
"Omit needless words."
During a lecture in Melbourne, John Ralston Saul (author of such neo-humanist books as Voltaire's Bastards) raised an interesting point about vocabulary. He claimed that a sure sign of a decaying civilization is the coining of arcane and generally useless terms by various professions or special interest groups. As soon as this begins to happen, other groups begin to lose grasp of the ideas and thinking of these groups, causing rifts in society. He said he noticed this in many past civilizations that he has studied.
Even if this is true, perhaps the effect of this in our civilization can be mitigated by the free access of this kind of information on the internet. Still, it bears thinking about when we decide to invent words for no other purpose than to differentiate ourselves from others, or just to be cool.
"enterprise" -- Isn't everything an enterprise?
"solution" -- I think this was coined to describe things that aren't exactly a product or a service but some combination, but now it doesn't mean anything at all. In my hometown a garage renamed itself "Automotive Enterprise Solutions" during the 90's boom.
"robust" -- This isn't a bad word, but it's commonly misused. If you look up the dictionary definition, it means something like "strong", "reliable". In IT, however, people really want to say "featureful" but that isn't a word so they misuse "robust" instead. Apache is more robust than IIS because it doesn't crash -- not because it has more bells and whistles.
After exploring the rest of the drivel-land known as the Wild Wild Web while Advogato was down, I'd like to throw this word into the pile: civilization. Even the form of the word itself encourages fuzzy thinking.
Someone says: "We're a civilized society."
Intended meaning: "We're an enlightened society."
Actual meaning: "We're a society which boasts lots of weapons of mass destruction and lots of silly laws and customs, so it doesn't matter even if our minds are roughly the same as that of the Stone Age Man."
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
del.icio.us
Digg
Google bookmark
reddit
Simpy
StumbleUpon
Furl
Newsvine
Technorati
Tailrank