Jargon is defined by Chambers dictionary as ‘the terminology of a profession’ but also as ‘unintelligible talk, gibberish; chatter, twittering’.

Jargon has an important place as a ‘dialect’, so that people with common interests or expertise can communicate quickly and efficiently. As with any dialect, the problem comes when there is a different level of understanding between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader.

If you’re writing something targeted at serious database techies, for example, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t call a spade a spade and describe something as ‘a scalable cross-platform tool with a powerful SQL editor and schema navigator’.

But if your audience is not quite so specialised, or, particularly, if your audience consists of readers with many different levels of specialisation, then jargon should be put in its place.

On a website, for example, this is easy, because navigation means different audiences can go straight to where they will feel at home.