Bullfighter

Hannibal, Ars Technica Newsdesk relays from Reuters via CNET:

A new software program sends a clear message to corporate America: Cut the bull.

New York-based Deloitte Consulting admits it helped foster confusing, indecipherable words like "synergy,'' "paradigm'' and "extensible repository.'' But now it has decided enough is enough. On Tuesday, it released Bullfighter to help writers of business documents avoid jargon and use clear language.

First, there was that English-to-Swedish-chef thing (at least it's the first one I remember), and then the jive server, and then the pornolizer, and a whole host of other dialectizers. But until now, nobody had bothered to invent what we all needed the most: a de-jargonizer.

"We've had it with repurposeable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leverageable mind share,'' Deloitte Consulting partner Brian Fugere said.

Bullfighter, as the software is called, could potentially help investors spot troubled companies. Used to test language used by now-bankrupt energy trader Enron from 1999 through 2001, Fugere said the program found that "it got progressively more obscure as they got deeper and deeper into trouble."

First, there was that English-to-Swedish-chef thing (at least it's the first one I remember), and then the jive server, and then the pornolizer, and a whole host of other dialectizers. But until now, nobody had bothered to invent what we all needed the most: a de-jargonizer.

[..article quoted above goes here..]

I have a friend who works for Accenture, and I was always trying to talk him into introducing fake business jargon terms at meetings, especially terms that had some type of attendant hand gesture. Note that the hand gesture is essential if the term is going to have its full impact.

You know, it just occurred to me that the only argots that don't come with an attendant set of poses and bodily motions are the strictly online ones, like l33t speak and text messaging shorthand. Even when spoken idiomatic English is written, it still connotes certain movements; who can read the output of the jive server without it conjuring some kind of mental image of a linguistic performance that involves the entire body L33t speak, in contrast, seems entirely disembodied when compared to the physicality of offline dialects. I bet that l33t speak's extensive use of ASCII and alternate spellings are a direct visual analog for the equally visual bodily context of offline speech.

I know from my work in paleography and philology that accentuation and punctuation only start to show up in manuscripts when there's enough temporal and/or geographical distance between a text's original context and that of its copyists/readers to where the aural elements of the text (pronunciation, meter, etc.) either have been lost or are in danger of being lost. So you might say that, as a general rule in oral-chirographic societies, diacriticals and punctuation make up for a lost aural context. A similar rule for online "speech" in our present visual-typographic society might be that the idiom's elaborate visual presentation--where many of the ASCII-based symbols don't really represent "words" or "phrases" at all, but are more gestural in nature--provides a visual context that would otherwise be lacking. Anyway, it's just a thought for the anthropologists in the audience to ponder. (Speaking of anthropologists and online vs. offline dialects, I thought this was cool, though I haven't read all of it yet.)