It doesn't take a survey to show that jargon puts people off, but AMD's discovery that it stops people buying new products might worry the industry more.

Jargon starts out as a shortcut; if we give a technology (say, Bluetooth) a name then we don't have to explain what it is every time. Having a technical term for the technology means it won't get confused with other similar technology (say, Wi-Fi). If you know what jargon means, it is not meaningless jargon or Pseuds' Corner pedantry, it is precise description.

But not everyone does know, and the latest buzzwords define who's in and who's out. Using jargon to define a social group turns into being technical for the sake of it, excluding and confusing mainstream users and consumers. That's not always a bad thing.

Putting technical jargon in a document is a way of flagging who it is for: if you don't understand the difference between a bastion, a firewall and a DMZ, you shouldn't be implementing your company's security policy.

You can't simply banish technical terms from technical documentation, because differences matter. FireWire and IEEE 1394 are used interchangeably and that's not usually a problem, because FireWire is the implementation of the standard you will come across most often.

But Sony's iLINK is also a 1394 implementation and you can't use that indiscriminately because a FireWire cable has six pins and an iLink cable only has four. All too often, the problem is jargon going walkabout.

If I talk about disambiguating a reference in code, that's a valid technical term. If I talk about disambiguating anything in normal conversation, it could either be a joke or very clumsy language. Or it could be a way of making what I'm talking about sound more impressive than it actually is.

Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina believes IT companies have deliberately tried to make technology sound complicated, using technology terms rather than business terms. If you are in business, you care more about what IT can do for you than how it does it. That does not mean details don't matter, but if you can't explain what a product does and why it matters in plain English, maybe it is not as important as Three Letter Acronyms and oddly capitalised tradeMarks make it sound.

It is not just technical jargon, either. In the 18th century, knowing Greek and Latin was a sign of success; English bears the imprint of words coined more to show off than because anyone needed a new term and we are still using them to sound more important.

Some phrases are meaningless not because they're too technical but because they're general to the point of cliche. Telling me a product is "designed to" do something says nothing about what it actually does or whether it's any good at it, and you'd hardly assume the feature got there by accident.

In everyday English, a car breakdown service gives you everything you need; in computing terms it would be a box of spare parts, a list of instructions and some warning lights. Jargon may have its place but it never replaces knowing what you want to say and saying it clearly.