I often receive emails from advertisers and people who run advertising networks wanting to place their ads on Omniglot. Or as they put it, they want to “buy redundant inventory” or “buy website traffic”. They talk about fill rates, CPMs, passback options, DSPs, geos, volume impressions and monetization strategies. Recently one asked me to let them know “if we have a moving forward position”, after an exchange of emails.
I know what some of this jargon means, and have looked up the rest, but I still don’t fully understand some of it, and don’t think it’s worth the effort. Usually I just say I’m not interested.
I don’t really have a monetization strategy for Omniglot – I just place ads and affiliate links that I think are relevant, and make sure they don’t get in the way of the content. This seems to work as I’m making a good living from the site.
Jargon like this develops in many fields. It’s a quick way of referring to things that you often talk about. However it is only really meaningful to others in your field. Outsiders can find it impenetrable and might need some help, not only to understand the terms, but also the concepts behind them.
Some jargon, especially business jargon, doesn’t really mean anything – blue sky thinking outside the box, and all that.
Do you use jargon?
Do you have any interesting examples of jargon you use, or have heard others using?
Working with (UNIX) computer systems involves a lot of attention to “processes”, which has a specific meaning in this context. Processes may be parents, children, run as demons/daemons (the spelling “daemon” seems to have become standardized), become orphans or zombies, or be killed by another process. So there is a lot of fun in using ghoulish-sounding names for actual operations, like “a daemon that kils orphans” or “reaping zombies”.
The Linux OS deals with running out of memory (abbreviated OOM) by stopping some processes, and I’ve read serious article on “dealing with the OOM killer”.
Are professional and scientific terms considered jargon? E.g., is “loop” in the context of programming jargon?
I do like how your ads are relevant and non-annoying.
Wikipedia would say yes:
The main trait that distinguishes jargon from the rest of a language is special vocabulary—including some words specific to it and, often, narrower senses of words that outgroups would tend to take in a broader sense.
I’m a biochemist working at a pharmaceutical company in a protein engineering group–so there’s plenty of jargon to go around. But we also have next-level jargon–we’ve developed our own jargon for concepts that would take a phrase or more of “standard” jargon to explain. When I speak to outside protein engineers, I have to remind myself not to use that jargon and stick to the industry standard jargon.
Jargon.