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I have always tried to talk in normal words all the time. It makes it much easier when I need to explain to a co-worker or the boss how something works or why it has to be done before we can take care of the visible problem.

I try not to make others feel stupid just because they don't know the keywords. Sure it would be easier and faster to talk but if I'm not understood it's meaningless.




On the other hand, if you use the term "JVM Recorder" while everyone else is using the correct name "Flight Recorder", you're now forcing everyone to use non-standard language just for your benefit.

Far too often I hear people argue "it's not in the cloud, it's on a server" which makes people think it's hosted on-prem on a server that we own and control and maintain, but it's not. It's on someone else's network, on someone else's server, a server that they own and control and perform the maintenance for. But that's a really long winded response, so luckily we agreed on a single word to represent that concept: cloud. Like it or not, words have meanings and those meanings have definitions. If someone isn't likely to understand the word, explain it using its definition. Don't just unilaterally switch to a completely different word.

My CEO might not know what "serverless" means, but once I explain it using its commonly accepted definition she can now read the commonly accepted word in a trade magazine and understand what they're talking about. Otherwise she'd never know to link the word to its definition. That's the basic concept of language.




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