On the one hand they're jargon used as short hand to technical concepts understood well by domain experts. And the concision they afford can lead to deeper understanding as they transcend their composite or adapted meanings and become base terminology in and of themselves (I think of e.g. Latin in English legal terminology. "Habeas corpus" has a literal meaning when translated, but the understood jargon has a deeper, and more specific meaning). At that point, they are powerful because of the precision of meaning and concision of expression they afford.

On the other hand, they lift intuitive terminology from a base language that is understood in vaguer terms by a broader audience. And this creates invisible disconnects because the abstraction created by these terms leaks like a sieve unless you know the precise semantics and have the model to use them.

By translating a discourse into a higher metaphoric level, we increase precision and efficiency amongst mutual understanders, but at the same time, we increase the level of ambiguity, the number of possible interpretations, and the availability of terms familiar to (and thus, handles to grab on to) non-understanders. And that latter situation allows non-understanders to string together what sound superficially like well-formed thoughts using jargon terms, but based on the base language semantics. But without the deeper knowledge required to understand whether a given utterance scans or not.

That's how I've been trying to wrap my head around it at least. I hope it doesn't sound like moralizing or condescension, I don't mean it to. I know I'm "guilty" of trying to manipulate metaphoric models that I don't actually understand, based on the lay-semantics of their jargon.