[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.