When I first started writing about technology in the late 1990s, my coworkers and I would always know when a new hire had really started to hit their stride. It was when they started making jokes with the jargon.

The technology industry has always been full of arcane terms and acronyms, and one of the easiest ways to get a laugh in our office was to string bits of them together in unexpected ways. If you actually knew what the jargon meant, this could be a lot funnier than it probably sounds. What made it funny, in part, was knowing that our friends and families — the “normal” people in the real world — would find it completely incomprehensible and humourless. Now I think there are fewer and fewer people who would feel left out of some of those jokes.

It started with “content,” which somehow elbowed its way into the media industry not long after blogging platforms were invented and somehow managed to displace “story,” “article,” “column” or “feature.” Then some really weird stuff started popping up into everyday vernacular. When you write about software, the people who sell it talk a lot about “solutions.” This has also been adopted by all kinds of consumer literature. I’ve even seen a shoe store that was branded “Bata Solutions.”

These things have a way of creeping up on you. For the last year or so I’ve been writing a lot about mobile apps, and though I may be too immersed in the subject matter, I feel like it won’t be long before “monetization” and “monetize” are used as frequently by grandmothers as they are by developers. We will forget the days when clunky phrases like “get people to pay for something” were used instead.

I am convinced that this influence on language is a one-way affair, starting in the business world and extending out. When it begins from everyday people, the terms don’t seem to last. Remember when PCs and software were new, and people talked about “computerizing” things? It seems more ridiculous a verb now than it did then. The same with co-opting brands: some people still “Google” stuff, I suppose, but I haven’t heard of anyone “Xeroxing” anything in years. Even ‘The Net” disappeared when we realized using the Web was less about going to a place than a state of being: “online.”

It doesn’t feel like this imposition of “tech talk” (another dead phrase) into the parlance of our times is doing anything to actually enrich language. And perhaps that’s because we let it happen to us rather than think more deeply, more proactively, about what it is we want to say. Language, of course, is a technology all its own. But when we speak clearly, fully, passionately, we are surely more than mere “users.”