[czzr]

All areas of practice have their own jargon, words that superficially sound similar to regular English but actually have specific insider meaning that promotes faster in-group communication (and a degree of in-group signalling) - this is true for scientists, software engineers, yoga instructors and yes, business people.

[skytreader]

> that promotes faster in-group communication

I think the reason that business jargon gets more flak than usual jargon is because it does not really facilitate faster communication. At least not to everyone involved. Maybe salesman to salesman, business dev to business dev, it would make sense. But then they use that jargon with everyone else (i.e., when it is not appropriate to) and it sounds just as ridiculous as when they hear a dev say "We can't do that without considerable infrastructure overhaul. The current LTS is still a year away from EOL but the vendor has decided to use incompatible dependencies anyway".

If that were me, I'd just say "There's a lot of work involved to make that happen. We're talking 60-hour work weeks if you want that deadline." Or something like that. And if you hear me use the former wording in a meeting with non-technical people involved, you can bet it's just me trying to sound relevant to the meeting (because the next question would be "Could you elaborate?" and I will use more jargon, which will cause a cycle of explanation and boy won't I look important?)

It's ridiculous for me to hear "We need to get this done because we want to capture this market and turn this vertical into a core competency. This will make our portfolio more attractive to investors." when you can just say "Our client really needs/wants these features. We risk losing them if we don't deliver by the deadline."

There's also something to be said about weird turns of phrase that make communications sound less personal. Whereas I would just say "As I already told you," business-speak will make me use "As per my last email...". I don't know about others but the first time I encountered "As per my last email", it did feel foreign to me, like it's not English anymore. Modesty aside, I've read a lot, fiction and nonfiction, but only in my work inbox will I find "As per my last email".

[amyjess]

At least part of it is to keep civil.

There are memes floating around that joke that common businesspeak phrases like this are just polite ways to phrase insults, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, when someone says "as per my last email", it is a very thinly-veiled version of "are you too stupid to understand what I just told you?".

But you have to keep civil in a business environment because a) money is on the line and b) you're going to have to keep interacting with the same people for a long time.

[pas]

> As per my last email

Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)

[skytreader]

> Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era?

It might as well be. It just always struck me as wrong usage, for lack of better term. "Per", to me, is always in the sense of "for each": per month, per head, etc.

That said, I decided to look it up. And quoting from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20per:

> Is It Grammatically Correct to Say _as per_?

> ...The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason. On the other hand, it has been used to good effect in facetious mock-business-English ("as per the President’s shiny new Environmental Policy Act"). ...

Looks like I'm not the only one who was puzzled by this turn of phrase. You learn new things everyday. :)

(edit: formatting)

[pas]

I thought it comes from some tortured Latin (see "per se", and per also meaning "by means of"). And the "as" shouldn't even be there.

[passer_byer]

>As per my last email

As a native English speaker, if I encounter this phrase I take it to suggest I am not paying attention.

[stewartm]

If you work for a business, are you not all 'business people'?

In my working lifetime, having people occupying managerial roles that have zero relevant shop floor experience, has gone (or at least feels to have gone) from being the exception, to the absolute norm. Therefore in my experience, this, combined with the point you started with, is the nub of the matter.

Managers when faced with not having a clue what a team in a field that naturally has its own jargon are talking about, are desperate to recover the balance of power. Thus they end up speaking a language designed to to exclude all apart from those who submit to their influence and join in.

[thaumasiotes]

> All areas of practice have their own jargon, words that superficially sound similar to regular English but actually have specific insider meaning

Related: coverage of the recent cum-ex scandals has often included the factoid that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".

Of course this isn't true. While cum is Latin for "with", the Latin for "without" is sine -- ex is Latin for "from". Instead, as used in the name of the scandal and the operations behind it, ex is ordinary English financial jargon for "without".

[tomatocracy]

Ex as a prefix does ultimately derive from Latin here but meaning "outside" (hence eg excommunicated or exclave), not "without". This makes sense linguistically because the entitlement to the dividend is outside the scope of what's being bought and sold in the trade.

[thaumasiotes]

The meaning of ex in ex-dividend is not "outside".

As originally used in the financial jargon ex-dividend date, ex is used correctly and has the sense "after (in time)". That is, if you buy something ex-dividend, the dividend has already been paid (you're buying after the payment), and so you won't get it. [1] It's sense II in Lewis and Short ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... ) (Note sense II.A.2, which gives us the more vernacular English prefix ex-, as in ex-wife.)

"Outside" is not even one of the many senses of ex in Latin; ex always has a sense related to the core concept of "from". "Outside" is extra.

[1] For some reason, the ex-dividend date is one day before the actual payment, but the idea is still that you're buying after the date of the dividend.

[frankc]

Just a minor correction. The ex-date is not necessarily the date it is paid. It is the day after holders of the security are entitled to the dividend. The actual pay date comes later. The important thing is that the price of the security adjusts on the ex-date because the money has now been allocated.

[tomatocracy]

The ex date is the first day when the security trades without rights to the dividend (or rights, or coupon etc). It's not the day when holders are entitled to the dividend because if you trade on a particular day, you don't own the securities until settlement occurs which is on a later day (different markets have different conventions here for how much later). The company/issuer will have a record date for administrative purposes when they take a snapshot of the ownership register so the ex date is the first date on which settlement will take place after that record date. The payment date may even be some weeks after this but is set by the company but this isn't really relevant to when the ex date is.

[frankc]

I think we are in agreement?

[tomatocracy]

I suppose youre talking about terms of art. That's true for business too, I agree, but I'd argue that this is words/phrases like "EBITDA", "division", "tier 1 client". There's also useful shorthand like using the CEOs first name only, which happens even in Megacorps where few people have ever even met the CEO.

Corporate-speak is something different though to me - it's purpose is not to convey any specific meaning but simply to posture, which is why it's so widely hated.