Today I’m introducing two new awards:
- The POE Award — for plain old English
- The POO Award — for pervasive obfuscatory oration
When I work on projects, the room typically has a combination of people who are native speakers of three very different languages:
- Clinical speak
- Business speak
- Technical speak
This gets even tougher as there are usually strong — and often combative — dialects within these languages:
- Clinical speak dialects include doctor (further broken down by specialty), nurse, pharmacist, lab tech, radiology tech….you get the point.
- Business speak dialects include accountant, manager, marketer, etc. The most challenging business dialect of all often is lawyer — some question whether this dialect even is intended to further common understanding among humans.
- Technical speak dialects also are of many varieties — the more initials the better — HTML, XHTML, XML, Ajax, web 2.0, PHP….
When you have so many languages and dialects in the room, you need to have a common denominator. I find that the best common denominator is POE.
At the other extreme is POO. The POO Award is reserved for those times when someone has been speaking or writing for a while and your reaction is “WTF was that all about?”
I will be the first to acknowledge that I myself am occasionally deserving of a POO award.
Discussion
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