This explains a whole lot of things -- like for example how I once heard a certain engineering director explain, with a straight face, how one cloud platform was more "agile" than other. By which he meant (as he explained) "has a more user-friendly toolchain". Which is of course a perfectly valid criterion for preferring one platform over another.

But no, he had to say "agile". Which by now of course has become completely meaningless, other than to mean vaguely "good". And as the article points out, a speech signal: a way of indicating "I'm an engineering director (or product evangelist, whatever) now, and one of the ways I maintain that slot in the status hierarchy is by using lingo you don't dare challenge me on, and certainly not to my face. Even though most everyone knows it's basically bullshit."

Before I read the article, I found his choice of words quite perplexing. But now it makes perfect sense.