Buzzword
A term describing other terms used to make sentences longer and more ambiguous; in this respect they strictly oppose jargon.In a world where information is not free, where people have no reliable index to look for information, where secrecy is made a right to protect the thieves, where free-speech is limited to a racket of mercenary publishers, most people are not guided by ideas and sound reasoning, but by slogans and incantations.
Empty words appear that replace ideas, that are used to designate everything and everything's contrary. These words are endlessly repeated, one in conjunction with others, with the higher number of times their being unintelligibly read in a drone by the higher number of people being held as evidence of their high content. To simulate reason, these words are often defined the ones from the others in a circular way, out of any objective sense. Such are buzzwords.
Sometimes, buzzwords are created out of the blue, by marketing people. Usually, they are born out of some people trying to convey some intuition, but unable (and too often, unwilling) to crystallize it into explicit ideas. Often, these words might have had one or many precise meaning, and/or some people are tempted to find a precise meaning to give to them. The phenomenon is then at its worst, as the buzzing noise interferes with people trying to soundly communicate, resulting in people not understanding what each other (or even themselves) mean.
The solution to manipulate the real concepts hidden by the buzzwords, is then to add or remove qualifiers to these words, or find different etymological reconstructions of them, or make it clear in some way that the word is not pronounced in phase with the drone, but in a meaningful context. In the world of Computing, famous buzzwords include "Object-Oriented", "Client/server", "Micro-kernel", "industry-standard", "centralized", "multimedia", "RISC", and more.
We in the TUNES project are committed in not participating in any buzzing, and try never to use a word overloaded with buzz, but after having given a precise definition of what we mean by it. Thank you to warn us of any place where this commitment is not clear or fails.
Buzzwords are the foundation of all religions (second meaning).
This page is linked from: GUI Jargon Object-Oriented