A word about jargon

[tahnan]

Jon Carroll of the SF Chronicle has a good column today--no surprise, he nearly always does. It's about enthusiasts, people who have particular strong interests in, well, stuff. It's full of neat observations, but I especially liked this one, which I suspect jadelennox will also appreciate.

I hate business prose; it's written by people retreating into jargon to obfuscate the situation because they don't actually understand the situation. Enthusiast prose is written by people advancing into jargon to clarify the situation because they do actually understand the situation.

Comments

[saxikath]

Huh. Interesting distinction.

Enthusiast jargon can also be used as an exclusionary tactic, too, of course; if you don't understand the jargon, you're not "in the know."

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Certainly so. Tools (guns, jargon, the passive voice) can be used for great good or great evil. (Remember, passives don't kill sentences, (bad) writers kill sentences! (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002440.php))

The particular reason I know that Jade will appreciate this is that people in academic fields in general, and litcrit in particular, are frequently accused of exactly these two things: obfuscation, per Carroll's comment, and exclusion, per yours. "Why do you have to use words like 'heteronormative' and 'presupposition accomodation', which makes your prose unreadable?"--unreadable as in obfuscated, or unreadable as in exclusionary to those not in the lopo. But academics use these words because we're clarifying a situation that we do understand; the jargon is more precise and more informative than non-jargon.

[saxikath]

Point taken.

However, I've also seen academic writing that seems, as far as I can tell, to use the jargon to obfuscate. (I remember one particular piece in grad school. I mean, it was in my field, more or less, and I couldn't understand it.) I understand that phrases like those you cite have their use within a discipline, and are necessary -- but my experience with certain strands of history that draw on literary criticism is that the authors are using the jargon because they can, not because it actually clarifies anything. Or rather, they use the jargon seemingly without caring whether their audience understands them or not.

I also think it's important for enthusiasts who want to spread their enthusiasms to be able to communicate about their enthusiasms without the jargon, or at least including definitions of the jargon they use. (I try to be careful about this with puzzles, for instance.) The same goes for academics who want to communicate outside their specialties.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I also think it's important for enthusiasts who want to spread their enthusiasms to be able to communicate about their enthusiasms without the jargon...

No doubt! What Jade's run into is complaints from people outside the specialty who're reading papers that aren't aimed at an outside audience. Academics and enthusiasts shouldn't use jargon when talking to outsiders; but conversely, outsiders shouldn't complain about jargon used when academics and enthusiasts talk to each other. (Well, again, unless they're doing it at the dinner table; then it's exclusionary.)

And of course, there certainly are people who use academic jargon like business jargon: to cover up the fact that they have no clue what they're talking about. I've also read impenetrable things in my field. (I'm lookin' at you, Chomsky!)

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Some of the use of jargon in academic writing is...a bit like kenning in old epics, in an way. Words or short phrases which, though they also have their own surface meaning, are used as a reference to an entire story / debate / body of work that the audience is assumed to already be familiar with. What makes it impenetrable to the outsider, of course, is that those words already have their own meaning among laypeople which at best is totally unrelated and at worst is just close enough to make the reader THINK they know what's being said. It's both fascinating and frustrating.

I dealt with relatively little of it in grad school because my field is young enough that one could actually write a glossary of its jargon. Our jargon words are generally terms for specific, definable things whose meanings aren't under debate. There was one class that was an exception, of course - it was relevant to my studies, but wasn't really in my field, so I lacked some of the necessary familiarity with the historical discourse on the subject. 'Socio-cognitive Perspectives on Educational Technology'. It was mostly a discussion of constructivism (Vygotsky, Brunner, et al). It was fascinating, but I very clearly remember reading a short paper for the class, recognizing each and every word as English and acknowledging that they were used in a way compatible with English syntax, and yet being totally unable to derive any sensible meaning from them. It might as well have been a Mad-Lib.

[jadelennox]

oh, snap! tahnan, would it be okay if I link to this conversation to some people in fandom (and if so, should I specifically tell them not to link it out on the wider fandom newsletters if they find it interesting)? Because this that touchstone has just said is exactly what cathexys has often drawn as a comparison between academic and fan writing -- context and shared inferences creating shorthand references.

[jadelennox]

Exactly! I go out of my way, when writing, not to use jargon when common English would work as well. But sometimes common English takes a paragraph to explain something which jargon can get across in two or three words ("performative language", "essentialize", and, as you say, "heteronormative" are all ones I use commonly). Like Kath, I get upset when people open their introductory paragraph of papers with sentences is so loaded with jargon that the abstract or first page alone is already offputting to people who don't know all the language, but at the same time, it's important to take advantage of good academic jargon when it is available.

The place I find it most difficult is where the academic jargon term overloads in existing English word, and people can speak for hours without ever realizing they're using the terms to mean different things. Some examples: "critique", "queer", "problematic".

Fandom gets into fights about this all the time, actually. The fan scholars and fan/academics use jargon terms to talk about fandom in the exact same forum (mailing lists and livejournal) that the rest of fandom (including, frequently, the fan scholars and fan/academics) used to talk about fandom in an entirely casual context. Blowups happen because somebody doesn't understand why one fan is using jargon to talk about how we all love the same television shows. And, to be fair, people use academic jargon to put each other down in fannish conversations, as Kath complains sometimes happens in academia. (Its funniest when somebody says "well, I know this is true, because I am an English major and have taken three classes in media studies!" At which point it always turns out that the person with whom that fan is arguing is a professor of culture studies and has written four books on the subject. Oh, livejournal.)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

But I think "heteronormative" is an excellent word; it describes in a single word the situation where society/text/whatever assumes that there are only male and female and male-female relationships. It's the best sort of jargon; that which concisely describes a complex situation that needs to be frequently referred to in discussion.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

Um, I think you mean "Sentences aren't killed by passives, sentences are killed by (bad) writers."