The upside of workplace jargon

livemint.com:

workplaces everywhere. Some of this jargon is not much more than slang. The “blue goose" is what White House staffers call the travelling presidential lectern.

The “grid" is the nickname for the diary of planned policy announcements by the British government. Doctors have a private vocabulary for patients when they are out of earshot. “Status dramaticus" is how some medics diagnose people who have not much wrong with them but behave as though death is nigh; “ash cash" is the fee that British doctors pocket for signing cremation forms.

Such shared language is not exactly high-minded but it does serve a useful purpose—creating a sense of tribe and of belonging. Each company generates its own particular lexicon. The GE logo is also known as “the meatball" by people inside the industrial firm.

At Stripe, a digital-payments company, hiring-committee meetings are called “tropes". A “fourth leader" is what journalists at The Economist call lighthearted opinion articles. No one knows why; it is usually the fifth of five editorials.

But the knowing is enough. The code confers membership. Jargon can spread for practical reasons as well as cultural ones.

The airline industry has the usual slang, from “deadheads" (off-duty crew on a commercial flight) to “George" (a common nickname for the autopilot). But codifying knowledge in agreed ways can be a serious business. Well over 1,000 passengers and crew lost their lives between 1976 and 2000 in accidents where misunderstandings over language were found to have played a role.

Pilots use highly standardised and scripted terminology in order to reduce the scope for potentially fatal errors. Terms can arise as a way of increasing efficiency. A paper published last year, by Ronald Burt of