ConFigures

Jargon

I was put off when I came across the term “thinkLet” today, but went looking for more info to find out if there was more to it than buzzword coinage in pursuit of publication (a phenomenon I’ve run across before).

I remember an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (”Sidehacker”, maybe?) where Joel and the ‘bots decided that all that was needed to bring motorcycle sidecar racing into popularity as a sport was that it needed its own nifty jargon, which led to them peppering their commentary on race scenes in the movie with fake words for what they were watching. It was silly fun, but … I remember part of the fun of learning curling (the kind on ice, with brooms and stones) was knowing what “kiss shot” and “hog line” and other terms meant, and coming to use them naturally.

Jargon *can* help a group form and identify connections with each other. Adding “in-crowd” definitions and acronyms to a group glossary can be a team-building activity (and also, one more way to engage people in knowledge management (knowledge gardening?)). It can also be excessively exclusionary, however, and can cause dismissal by others; it can get in the way of understanding. I’m not sure where the balance lies, but part of it, for me, has to do with how much the new word adds to language as a whole — could some other (old) word really do just as well, or does the new piece of jargon compress down what would take a lot of explaining to get across otherwise? Does it open up a new perspective?

I’m still not sold on “thinkLet”, but I did eventually find a couple of articles that went beyond hand-waving and indicated there may be something to the term (”a codified facilitation technique that creates a predictable pattern of collaboration”):

• A conceptual foundation of the thinkLet concept for Collaboration Engineering
• Using The thinkLet Framework To Improve Distributed Collaborative Writing (p. 6, list of thinkLets broken down by script, tool, pattern)