Words are Important

I've noticed that a lot of Reserve Officers, especially at the Senior Level, share a common lexicon. There is no surprise in this. Every profession has it's own diction. However, there are terms that they freely use that I believe, are 90% of the time, spoken without real forethought and are mere "verbal fillers". On of these terms/phrases is "second and third order effects". In fact, during the course of their conversations, I bet that if you were to suddenly stop them and ask for a contextual example, there would be a slightly uncomfortable moment of pause. They do not use the term/phrase in the way, for example, that a mathematician or military planner would who are thinking in terms of Game Theory, nor would they be using the term/phrase as an economist would in terms of positive and negative externalities (economic spillover effects). In fact, if they are using this term/phrase in the course of speaking to me about Supply Chain Management and Logistics, if I really wanted to, I could really show them up, although that's not my style...unless of course, they give me cause for such. So what does this term really mean...and I don't mean a dictionary definition, but in a way that everyone can really fathom? Imagine that we're living in the 1960s and the President is LBJ. Now let's say that the government tells the American public, "Don't worry, we're sending a small number of US Marines to Vietnam to guard Da Nang Air base." So now the public thinks...erroneously...that our role is limited to simply guarding the wire....a simple formula. However, as the airbase would be subject to mortar and rocket attacks, that means that the Marines who guard the base, now have to move out beyond the wire...the base perimeter, which now makes direct contact with the enemy reasonably foreseeable, which means fighting, which in turn means casualties and fatalities...in other words...war. These are second and third order effects that a bus driver or locksmith on Facebook may not readily perceive. In business, life and in war....words are important....very important. If you are engaged in a conversation that leads to some form of real decisionmaking, particularly with serious ramifications....there is no room for an "intellectual belch" in a circular exercise of ego gratification. Either what the individual manager, businessperson, or supervisor says has meaning or it has no meaning.