A discussion with @hikhvar is making me realise that after schadenfreude, kindergarten, weltanschauung and verkehrsverbund, we clearly need to export schwurbler next.
Do English speakers have a word for "person that attempts to disguise their own ignorance by flooding the conversation with smart-sounding words that are completely nonsensical in context"?
See, now you have one.
@PaulWay A schwurbler is a very particular kind of bullshitter, though.
You can bullshit tersely. You can say "Scrum is a great idea", and that's bullshit. But it's not schwurbeln. Schwurbeln would be to describe at great length how and why Scrum is a great idea, drowning out all other more reasonable voices in the conversation while you go through all items in the logical fallacies catalogue.
Well actually, aren’t you describing more of a Business Kasper here?
In the political context, you’re describing a “conspiracy nut.”
Sealioning is a recent term, but it describes many conversations I’ve had with people in IT. Superficial civility and ignorance of the subject at hand, from someone who just won’t stop talking. Example: “We can’t be agile if we write documentation! If we write things down we can’t adapt!”
@akareilly @xahteiwi @hikhvar I don't think your example is Sealioning. It's bullshit, or a succinct form of schwurbeln.
Sealioning is the "just asking questions" form of harassment - a person that asks an unending stream of seemingly polite questions without ever having to either defend the questions or answer any of their own.
A Sealion would ask why you hate agile so much, and where in the original agile manifesto it says we have to write documentation, and what the point of the documentation is if it's just going to change, and why you think it's so important to write documentation at all, and to give a list of twenty examples of agile projects that have done documentation as they've coded, and so forth.
I referenced three separate things.
1. Schwurblers talk about conspiracy theories specifically.
2. A Business Kasper is specifically a business bullshitter. An English equivalent would be a McKinsey consultant if you’re aware they use jargon to obfuscate and keep the invoices coming.
3. Sealions can use opening statements, and yes, they followed up with almost exactly what you wrote.
All of these types fall under the umbrella of “ad nauseam”
Language is funny! For example, a movie in a series can be called “Episode One” when the word “episode” usually refers to a TV show.
I remember being at a conference trying to talk about Star Wars when this derailed the conversation. Might have been a translation issue.
Florian Haas
PaulWay
Wren Reilly