This was a recent Tweet by a friend of mine, the content of which wouldn’t be any less clear to me if it was written in Mandarin. Yet I don’t question his intelligence nor do I suspect it was written under the influence, as I might if someone else had posted something so incoherent. Because, you see, my friend is an IT guy.

It occurred to me after reading his Tweet that people in his line of work have surrounded themselves beneath a cone of intelligence. So thick and indecipherable is the industry argot that they could start making stuff up – inventing product names and pulling acronyms out of thin air -  and those of us on the outside would be none the wiser.

For example, if someone were to post this:

This, I believe, is one of the effects of social media. We’re mixing more freely with people from different backgrounds, generations and professions, but we’re essentially playing on the IT people’s turf. They invented this stuff and they’re the ones that know how and why it works.

So this makes them the cool kids. The BM/WOCs. The top dogs. The big cheeses. And we need them to like us, or at least tolerate us, because we suspect they could banish us forever with a click of their mighty mouse.