Buzzing Buzzwords

It seems to me that there's a hearty amount of hypocrisy in many areas of PR, and the latest to really get me is that surrounding language used in PR writing. We're taught to keep it simple (to keep it clear, concise, yada yada yada). With those 7Cs of good writing in mind, PR seems to feel the need to put as many buzz words as possible into every outlet.

Web 2.0, wikis, social media, brand, blog, blogosphere, stakeholders, key messages, Gantt charts... these are things that don't exist outside PR, and even some people in PR don't remember all these terms. The reality of the situation, (and this is coming from anonymous sources in the industry) is that people have to learn about these things in school but they'll rarely use them by name in the real world. So why dwell on the proper names if no one really uses them? And in a business built on communicating to the world at large, why does communications insist on isolating everyone not in the industry?

Academic writing is considered too esoteric for the general public to read and really get into. Certainly, not everyone knows what Brahe's Geo-Heliocentric universe looks like, many would balk when coming across primum mobile in a text, and the majority would stare blankly into space when coming across the idea of gimbal-controlled mid-course automatic flight path corrections (to my faithful followers, that's the NASA reference!). But anyone reading these papers can look up these terms.

Why, then, does PR writing insist on using nothing but basic simple words yet allows for the "social media" buzzwords that no one outside the 'industry' can understand? Words that aren't in dictionaries, or aren't even clearly explained on our good friend Wikipedia? Why do we have to assume our audience is incapable of looking up anything that doesn't deal with current PR trends?

(image: Tycho Brahe's Geo-Heliocentric model of the universe)