"[2] Avoid like poison any specialized language of your own. Do _not_
redefine familiar terms into specialized jargon; do _not_ introduce
new abstract terms at all, and introduce general terms _only_ if you can
provide _perfectly_ clear and concrete examples of their use."
At the risk of annoying some of my colleagues, I would like to share the
perplexing observation that two of the most directly
linguistically-oriented paradigms being used in organizational learning
today -- Flores' ontology and Bandler and Grinder's Neuro-Linguistic
Programming -- suffer especially from this poison. In the case of
ontology, some of the language used is commonly- understood terms used in
new and unintuitive ways. In the case of NLP, well, the name speaks for
itself. (I am a great fan of the linguistic approach of NLP, but this has
been a long-standing peeve.)
-- Marilyn Darling mdarling@warren.med.harvard.edu