I think the reason that business jargon gets more flak than usual jargon is because it does not really facilitate faster communication. At least not to everyone involved. Maybe salesman to salesman, business dev to business dev, it would make sense. But then they use that jargon with everyone else (i.e., when it is not appropriate to) and it sounds just as ridiculous as when they hear a dev say "We can't do that without considerable infrastructure overhaul. The current LTS is still a year away from EOL but the vendor has decided to use incompatible dependencies anyway".
If that were me, I'd just say "There's a lot of work involved to make that happen. We're talking 60-hour work weeks if you want that deadline." Or something like that. And if you hear me use the former wording in a meeting with non-technical people involved, you can bet it's just me trying to sound relevant to the meeting (because the next question would be "Could you elaborate?" and I will use more jargon, which will cause a cycle of explanation and boy won't I look important?)
It's ridiculous for me to hear "We need to get this done because we want to capture this market and turn this vertical into a core competency. This will make our portfolio more attractive to investors." when you can just say "Our client really needs/wants these features. We risk losing them if we don't deliver by the deadline."
There's also something to be said about weird turns of phrase that make communications sound less personal. Whereas I would just say "As I already told you," business-speak will make me use "As per my last email...". I don't know about others but the first time I encountered "As per my last email", it did feel foreign to me, like it's not English anymore. Modesty aside, I've read a lot, fiction and nonfiction, but only in my work inbox will I find "As per my last email".
There are memes floating around that joke that common businesspeak phrases like this are just polite ways to phrase insults, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, when someone says "as per my last email", it is a very thinly-veiled version of "are you too stupid to understand what I just told you?".
But you have to keep civil in a business environment because a) money is on the line and b) you're going to have to keep interacting with the same people for a long time.
Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)
It might as well be. It just always struck me as wrong usage, for lack of better term. "Per", to me, is always in the sense of "for each": per month, per head, etc.
That said, I decided to look it up. And quoting from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20per:
> Is It Grammatically Correct to Say _as per_?
> ...The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason. On the other hand, it has been used to good effect in facetious mock-business-English ("as per the President’s shiny new Environmental Policy Act"). ...
Looks like I'm not the only one who was puzzled by this turn of phrase. You learn new things everyday. :)
(edit: formatting)
As a native English speaker, if I encounter this phrase I take it to suggest I am not paying attention.
In my working lifetime, having people occupying managerial roles that have zero relevant shop floor experience, has gone (or at least feels to have gone) from being the exception, to the absolute norm. Therefore in my experience, this, combined with the point you started with, is the nub of the matter.
Managers when faced with not having a clue what a team in a field that naturally has its own jargon are talking about, are desperate to recover the balance of power. Thus they end up speaking a language designed to to exclude all apart from those who submit to their influence and join in.
Related: coverage of the recent cum-ex scandals has often included the factoid that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".
Of course this isn't true. While cum is Latin for "with", the Latin for "without" is sine -- ex is Latin for "from". Instead, as used in the name of the scandal and the operations behind it, ex is ordinary English financial jargon for "without".
As originally used in the financial jargon ex-dividend date, ex is used correctly and has the sense "after (in time)". That is, if you buy something ex-dividend, the dividend has already been paid (you're buying after the payment), and so you won't get it. [1] It's sense II in Lewis and Short ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... ) (Note sense II.A.2, which gives us the more vernacular English prefix ex-, as in ex-wife.)
"Outside" is not even one of the many senses of ex in Latin; ex always has a sense related to the core concept of "from". "Outside" is extra.
[1] For some reason, the ex-dividend date is one day before the actual payment, but the idea is still that you're buying after the date of the dividend.
>> [The ex-date] is the day after holders of the security are entitled to the dividend.
> It's not the day when holders are entitled to the dividend because if you trade on a particular day, you don't own the securities until settlement occurs
Imagine that the ex-date for a security is 2017-05-19. You sell one such security on 2017-05-18. Settlement clears on 2017-05-22. Because of the delay in settlement, you held the security on the ex-date (and on the day before the ex-date), but you're not entitled to the dividend because you sold the security before the ex-date.
That's my reading of the two comments. I take no position on this. The point I'm making is different, that in the phrase "ex-dividend date", the "ex" and the "dividend" are not related to each other. They both relate to "date"; "ex-dividend" is not a logical unit within the phrase. However, the phrase "ex-dividend date" (good Latin usage) was clipped to "ex-dividend", and then people started assuming "ex" meant "without", because an "ex-dividend security" (no longer good Latin usage) was one that traded without rights to the dividend.
Stated another way --
A "dividend date" is a kind of date, a date related to the concept "dividend". "Ex-dividend date" is (originally) a prepositional phrase meaning "after the dividend date". It's not a kind of date related to the concept "ex-dividend"; "ex-dividend" is not a concept.
But then, English-speaking traders who didn't know Latin reanalyzed the phrase "ex-dividend date" as a noun phrase referring to a kind of date, which required a further reanalysis of what exactly "ex" meant. That new meaning, "without", is original to English.
In tree form, we have an original phrase (ex-(dividend date)) being reanalyzed as ((ex-dividend) date).
That's right. The ex date is relevant to the day you trade (which in practice means entering into a contract to buy and sell securities at a certain price, not actually delivering those securities/money), whereas the record date is the equivalent for the day of ownership. The ex date will be X-1 business days before the record date with X and the definition of business day depending on the market settlement convention. In some markets X=1 hence the confusion between the two, I think.
Corporate-speak is something different though to me - it's purpose is not to convey any specific meaning but simply to posture, which is why it's so widely hated.