Ron, you under-estimate the ability of the newly minted buzzword factories (oops, I mean folks with an MBA in Marketing) to take perfectly useful words and turn them into something that resembles the original about as closely as turnip stew resembles a turnip.
Probably went something like this:
Assistant Vice Minion to the Marketing Manager (MBA, BS, BO, BBQ, PDQ): "You call this new feature a Decision point? That sounds much too ordinary, I mean, it's really not much more complicated than an if-statement, or maybe a table driven decision tree. But that wouldn't sound like something we could charge a million bucks for, would it?"
Engineer: "Yes, you are right. It's not much more than a table driven if statement. In fact, we got the idea from an Excel macro running on the desk of a shipping clerk. We put a team of 30 designers on it a month ago and reverse engineered the design according to standard specifications. We've only got about 2,300 PRs open on the base functionality so if all goes well it will be ready to ship in the next few days. If you want a more descriptive name, I think you should know that before we engaged the Nomenclature Consultants the rest of us in the engineering team had been calling it the QuasiModo, which is short for Quad Array Superheterodyne Input Multiplexed Occipital Decision Oscillator function after the four processors it runs on and rather aptly describes the decision input design structure... "
Finance weenie, cutting him off: "Right we've got to call it something our sales executives can spell, or this part of our revenue curve is likely to represent an inflection point from positive to negative curvature, which I don't have to mention ... "
Vice Minion "What was that you said?"
Weenie: "Negative curvature"?
Vice Minion: "No, before that".
Weenie (exasperated): "Inflection point, you know (dripping sarcasm), where the first derivative of the curvature changes sign?"
Minion (promotion pending): "I don't want to know what an Inflection Point is [you idiot (muttered)]. It's the name. "Inflection Point"... sounds fast. Sounds neat. New. Something our competitors won't know what to do with and our customers will feel silly asking questions about. Perfect. I'll get the word to the sales executives immediately. How do you spell that"?
...
John |
