A lot of those phrases come about as a means of forestalling conflict. At 21 you know you know nothing, but you think you know everything.

The truth is the biggest time waster in collaborating with your peers is conflict. So we invented a language of drop in phrases.

I'll go one level higher on ALL those phrases. They ALL mean, "Hey, we've wasted a shit ton of time litigating, fighting, teasing, and getting over ourselves with conflict in this area. I'm gonna drop this phrase to remind everyone in the room we're here to at least try to focus on work, not fucking with each other and rehashing old arguments, so let's just skip that part and stay focused."

At 21 you haven't yet had your year long ego slap down with someone petty and slightly more powerful. You don't know what an orgasmic relief it is to be able to drop one of those phrases and basically say, "Look, let's skip the pissing contest and focus."

Sure, there's more blunt, faster, honest ways to say things. Go for it. Have your year long dick waving contest. Get fired. Then you'll start appreciating jargon.

Now, when I hear jargon, my first thought is, “ooh I wonder who’s life was almost ruined over THAT one!”

Full disclosure: I spent a lot of my life making excuses for the Chrysler products I owned over the years when they failed to proceed. I currently drive a 2007 300C SRT8 which is wonderful and frustrating in equal measure, a perfect example of the DaimlerChrysler collision: Mercedes "we can make this good" and Chrysler "we can make it cheap" from which Mercedes never really recovered.

Chrysler might be the most frustrating manufacturers that continues to exist. Their corporate approach seems to have been "how can we make this thing so marginal it barely functions so we save some money". The awful wiring looms, nastiest plastics, shoddily engineered engines, stupid choices in fasteners.

I think you can take every brand Stellantis now owns and point to the Chrysler-isation of them resulting in the poor reliability scores each and every one of them now has. Chrysler is like a slow, creeping disease that infects every sister company.

This quote is the best though:

"One is “this is invention.” This, usually said in a negative manner, literally meant “nobody else is doing this. Why the hell are we gonna be the first?” (Yes, that says a lot about Chrysler’s overall philosophy, but we won’t get into that)."

Out of all the Chrysler products I've owned, the best ones were not engineered by Chrysler. The XJ Jeep Cherokee we bought new in 1996 was the last thing AMC engineered and they are wonderful. The ZJ (which was the first Jeep to have Chrysler engineering input) was terrible. You could tell the amount of cheaping out Chrysler did on that car and it shows. The electrics alone would send you mad.

I actually had a ZJ and liked it. I bought it heavily used in 2016, I think 250K miles or so? The heater was anemic, and it didn’t really like to go into or out of 4WD. I flushed the heater core and radiator, changed every fluid, adjusted the transmission kickdown, and replaced most of the suspension. It worked great, and gave me zero trouble. All of the electrics worked, including the various fluid sensors, like wiper fluid level.

Maybe I had a unicorn and didn’t know it. It was my first and only Jeep.

Maybe I just bought a bad ZJ. My daughter used it for a few years as her first car and despite it trying to set itself on fire she did have a certain affection for it.

I’d still crawl over 50 ZJ to get to one good XJ though.

I’ve always admired manual XJs. Never had a good or even passable reason to buy one, but maybe one day.

And yet you made excuses for it and bought their products. You and millions of other people. So what did you expect them to do? Change course?

No I suppose not. They will continue to make unreliable cars and if they put the Hemi back in I’ll probably line up to be a sucker in the second hand market again.