Twisted tech talk

The high-tech industry has bestowed many gifts upon society over the past quarter-century. Clearer English is not one of them, the Associated Press notes:

Euphemism and allegory have always been common in business -- where few get fired, but plenty get "downsized" -- but some say the tongue-twisting technology industry has gone too far.

Alan Freedman, who has been writing technology encyclopedias for 25 years, realized things were really out of hand when people started asking him to decipher technology companies' own marketing materials -- the stuff they allegedly use to entice people to buy their products. What's worse, he says, is that it sometimes took him months to wade through the buzzwords.