Talking to older son this morning. He's been feeling stressed at work, but the reason why was unclear. Talking to a friend yesterday evening he figured it out.
He works for a company that does something with medical insurance. His particular job is editing descriptions of medical procedures, which are not always stellar examples of the written word.
Recently he was instructed to start replacing certain words with other terms. The words in question that he had been using were perfectly good words and adequately conveyed the required meaning. But now he is supposed to start using these new terms, which may not even be real words. This is medical insurance, so there may be some perfectly valid reason for using these new terms, like they have specific medical or legal meanings. On the other hand, this is medical insurance so the reason for using the new terms might be to obfuscate the message, or maybe it's some variation on a tried and true medical insurance scam.
In any case, there was no explanation accompanying this directive, or if there was it was generic corporate-speak that didn't explain anything, i.e. it was bullshit. Talking to his friends last night, one of them offered up this:
Brute facticity of compliance.
In other words use the damn words we tell you to and shut up about it. Yeah, that could engender a little stress.
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