We’ve all been there – something that’s been heavily marketed and it just gets your goat, it feels wrong.

Organic

A long time ago I first realised I suffered from this problem (of being narked by marketers who promoted nonsensical terms) when they came about with the fantastically useless word on food products ‘organic’. Well, you don’t say? The only other type of substance that’s not organic that I’m aware of is metallic, and that’s definitely not edible in quantities large enough to see. Simply put, anything that’s organic is or was once alive and composed of organs or organelles. So essentially, everything you eat is organic. Why couldn’t they find some better term to use? Insecticide free? Not quite the same ring to it as may be, but nevertheless a lot more accurate.

Then there was this other fantastically annoying term which luckily, is now dying out.

Credit Crunch

My goodness. What does it even mean? Some kind of breakfast serial that counts towards an educational module? I don’t know. How about: ‘recession’? They used it? Good. Why bother making up sensationalistic nonsensical terms then!

Anyway, this brings me rather roughly to…

HD

Yes. HD. Do you know what it means? I don’t. ‘High-definition’ can mean almost anything, depending on where you are at the time. It can relate to sound, video and even physical things. Within the past six years or so, the term has been stolen for use in the video media industry. But even then, HD can mean any number of possible things. Essentially, a company or entity decides that the products they’re currently selling are ‘Standard Definition’. This then gives them the right to name anything successively ‘High Definition’. So, where TV is concerned SD is that of a DVD – 720 x 576 pixels. If that’s standard definition, what’s VHS? Anyway this means HD is anything above that, and there are a LOT of possible flavours: 720i, 720p, 1080i, 1080p. These being 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080 pixels respectively. Now, most HD TV broadcasts are merely 720i, the lowest possible version oh ‘High Definition’. Blu-ray on the other hand is the ‘full’ 1080p.

Then you come to buying a television. Now, most people know they ‘have to have’ a ‘High Definition’ television these days, but most are also unaware of the difference. This allows manufacturers to be unscrupulous; they’ve coined the term ‘HD Ready’ which makes you THINK you can use it to watch HD television. And you’d be right. But you may as well buy DVDs and not Blu-ray if the ‘HD Ready’ TV you buy is only 1280 x 720i. And I can tell you, there’s a very visible difference between 1080p and 720i (on a display that can handle 1080p of course).

Is all this choice good for consumers? No. It’s good for manufacturers who are trying to get the most money out of you for the least amount of cost and that’s called business. Business doesn’t like consumers, only shareholders.

Where was I? Ah yes. This HD stuff is all rubbish anyway – I was playing games on my PC back in 1998 that were a resolution of at least 1024 x 768 – High enough to be classed today as ‘High Definition’, and higher resolution than DVD which had only come out the previous year. What will the next generation of HD be called, ‘Ultra High Definition’? And after that? Super high? It’s like the 80s again. Super.

What resolution is a cinema film? HD? Why yes, yes it is! That’s why they’ve been getting ansi lately and trying to ‘invent’ (bring back) things like 3D. Admittedly, 3D these days is all about polarisation and not different colours so it looks much better. But where’s next for film? Clearly, we’re heading towards something like the holodeck straight out of Star Trek.

Buzzwords

So there you have it. A buzzword is a word said to make you think “Cool, I must have it!” and yet it is completely meaningless (or effectively useless because it doesn’t mean much). Contrast this with the term ‘Jargon’ which the news media have been banging on about for ages regarding Computers. A lot of this ‘Jargon’ however are actual words with proper meanings – Gigabyte, RAM etc. Would you describe any other profession as being full of jargon? It’s not that the meaning of the word is incorrect, just that they use it like it’s some sort of terrible thing. Every profession needs and has its own set of terminologies.

Rant over.