Buzzwords
People are obsessed with buzzwords. Obviously, almost everybody knows this. Most marketing is based around the idea of shoving a new buzzword down uneducated consumers’ throats. What astounds me, however, is how little people see beyond the word itself.
Let’s take the example of televisions. This is one of my favorite examples, and it is also, in my opinion, one of the greatest consumer hoodwinks in recent years. The buzzwords are no surprises: “1080p”, “HD-ready”, “LCD”, “LED” etc. I would eat my hat1 if anything more than a tiny minority of the people reading this couldn’t tell me2 what every single one of those 4 buzzwords mean, what the difference between 1080p and 1080i is. Or hey, between LCD and plasma televisions.
My television has a feature I hadn’t seen before on a television before I bought it: Bluetooth. The television has a Bluetooth receiver, and you can send it photos and display them on the screen. That’s it. Anybody who has used Bluetooth for anything more than hands-free will understand why this is ridiculous. Not only is it absurd to view photos by sending them one-by-one to a television over a medium that has throughput that barely rivals 1990’s ISDN lines, but it’s even more ridiculous once you realize the TV has no storage. The picture is gone when you don’t want to look at it anymore.
This is a feature? No: this is perceived value-addition. For people who don’t know any better, this seems like a wonderful solution. But a solution to what? I know I didn’t have the problem that I wanted to look at crappy-quality photos from my phone’s camera on my television’s non-persistent screen.
Another place where I’ve seen this come up is in professional settings. You’ll hear a lot of people throw around words lifted from management or statistical training books and try to pretend they know when to apply them. I recently met someone who works in a non-durable goods manufacturing industry, and he mentioned to me that he uses the statistical tool ANOVA, something which I have been using at work myself. This guy didn’t know what ANOVA stands for!
This rant has a purpose, I promise, and this is it: if you’re going to throw around a buzzword, make sure you know what it is. If you don’t know what it is, you come off looking either pretentious or like an idiot3. I’m fairly knowledgeable about computers, so I’ll know at the drop of a hat if someone mentions, say, “solid-state drives” to me and doesn’t even know what the “d” in the “drive” is. But, on the contrary, I know absolutely nothing about cardiac function, so I won’t walk into a hospital and say someone had an acute myocardial infarction4 when all I really think is that it’s a heart attack.
Stick to your strengths.