On the other hand, if we build on my technical jargon example a little bit, I could say that “We’re going to convert our backend to an SOA based on RESTful APIs.” And while that is also isolating to the layperson who has no clue what it means, it serves a purpose because it packs in a ton of specifics to the intended audience. The intent here is not isolate or obfuscate; the intent is efficiency of communications.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that rampant overuse compounds the problem. I know I turn off immediately when I hear someone say we’re going to leverage anything. So, while “leveraging synergistic best practices” certainly can mean something, my question is what benefit do you get when you could easily say the same thing in plain English to better effect? I’d still contend that corporate jargon of that sort serves no real benefit except to identify the speaker as a member of the club. As you say, “When the giants speak among themselves, they often use a little jargon.”

Your main points are exactly right. But even a phrase like “leveraging synergistic best practices going forward” can have a specific meaning to a specific audience.

For example, I write corpcom (now that’s jargon!) for a Fortune 500 company recently acquired by a Global 500 company. When the giants speak between themselves, they often use a little jargon.

To simplify a complex business model, what the acquirer bought was synergies. One example is the acquired company’s metalcasting expertise and capabilities, which fill a strategic gap in the acquirer’s global chain.

Some of the acquired company’s best practices relate to those synergies. And those will be leveraged going forward, or a few billion bucks will have been wasted.

Of course any idiot can string the words together — Dilbert used to run a great “mission statement generator” that would do it for you — and rampant overuse compounds the problem.

But I can see such a phrase in a C-level communication, and not just to obfuscate the writer’s ignorance.

But otherwise — well said.

Also, if you find that your Windows computer is unable to open a USB drive after doing partition-and-format type work on external hard drives, make sure your issue is not due to drive letter conflicts. After struggling with the issue for a few minutes, I realized that the network drive on our client’s corporate network uses the same drive letter that the machine was trying to assign to my USB key. This is something fairly easy to fix with the Windows disk management utility, but it took me a while just to identify the problem…