Business Jargon - 4 minute post

It's funny to me to think that one of the main reasons I was originally interested in a PhD in Linguistics was business jargon. As is the case with most things that I really like, I couldn't easily put my finger of the use and meaning of business jargon. The words that make a statement business-y weren't words that really added anything to the meaning of the phrase, except to point out, "Hey, there's business happening here!"

At the time I was working at a company that managed and modeled executive compensation. The vocabulary uptake was steep; I had to learn about a thousand new acronyms, and www.acronymfinder.com became my favorite go-to.

Well, I didn't end up studying business jargon back in graduate school, but I continued my interest in how language meaning is defined by context. Using Discourse Analysis principles and Corpus Linguistics (looking at words in the context of large bodies of text), I would dig into not just what it means to have "robust systems", but what a specific person is meaning when they say or write something at a specific time. It's a bit of a mission to sleuth for meaning amid all the tangle...