Who has the worst jargon?

I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate how my place of work was doing in terms of some business metrics. It was hell. Two groups that love their jargon and acronyms, the government and business. I thought that it could have been worse, because science could have been involved, too, so I wonder: who does the worst job with their jargon? I’m biased, but I think in general, science is not the worst offender — in the defense of myself and colleagues, it’s at least expected practice that you define any terms you’ve made up before you use them elsewhere in your presentation. In business and government/military (at least in my anecdotal experience), not so much. I’ve heard the stories (and seen once or twice for myself) of instances where someone will talk about FLURG at length, and then finally someone asks what FLURG stands for, because it turns out that nobody knew.

Unnecessary jargon obfuscates, er, hides meaning, because you focus on some buzzword without knowing what it means. So how does one distinguish between necessary and unnecessary jargon? In order to justify its use, the jargon has to give some benefit. The most obvious is shortening a long term to save time. To take some examples from atomic physics, Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy is CARS, a Magneto-Optic Trap is a MOT. I consider these to be reasonable jargon, even though you may not know what Raman Spectroscopy is (it’s not the study of inexpensive noodles, that’s Ramen Spectroscopy). But no information has been lost.
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