Crime Enforcement Services

Passed a car on the way home the other day. It was one of those security company cars that they try to make look as much like a cop car as they can. This one had big yellow letters that said “Crime Enforcement Services.” Now what exactly does the fellow driving the Crime Enforcement Services car do? Does he pull into a neighborhood and say “There’s not enough crime here. I’m here to enforce more crime.”? Does he help convince people that are thinking of committing a crime to go ahead and do it?

What a strange name for a security company. They definitely need to hire a better marketing company.

I know that computer people are famous for doing this too. We use words that people understand and know in ways that don’t make sense to non-computer people. We talk about putting something onto the print queue or starting/stopping a service or some other obscure thing. And the users don’t care about a queue or a service. They just want a piece of paper to spit out of the printer with their data on it. I’m sure that people who hire a security guard from Crime Enforcement Services don’t want to hear about Enforcement Service, they want a security guard to protect them.

I think many Christians are guilty of doing the same thing. Certainly Christians have a whole bunch of words that are difficult to understand. In fact, there’s a whole jargon of Christianese that people would need to learn to understand what we are talking about. Why would we want to do that? Do we think it makes us look intelligent? I don’t think it makes us look intelligent.