You can pry my jargon out of my cold dead brain

[muckefuck]

So last week's post about Ostler was originally conceived of as a post about my mild disappointment with both him and Abley, but I went on so long about the one, I couldn't see how to shoehorn in the other. Now whereas Ostler is a linguist but not a historian, Abley is neither linguist nor historian but journalist. Nothing wrong with that; as he points out, "you don't have to be a veterinarian to describe cats". Fine if he stopped there, but in preempting the assaults of us vicious philoglots, he goes farther and says:

I beg the forgiveness of linguists for trespassing on their territory and perpetuating whatever blunders have found a home in these pages--and I would gently remind them that their own voices are unlikely to be heard on the subject unless they speak out in terms that are lucid, intelligible, and free from jargon.

To which I reply, "Bite me. Is that free enough from jargon for you?" I can't tell you all how damn sick I am of being upbraided by people outside my field for using "jargon". Why is this always a pejorative term among laymen? This is linguistics, not pop psychology or pomo theory. Our "jargon" is not some hermetic cant to fool everyone into thinking we know what we're talking about when we don't. If "laymen's terms" or "ordinary language" were sufficient to describe what we need to describe, then we would never have needed to invent any "jargon".

Moreover, I've never found that it makes much different anyway. The fundamental problem with talking to hoi polloi is not that we use jargon but that they are so blinkered by their own biases and idées-fixes that they can't comprehend the basic tenets even when they are couched in the plainest language imaginable. If you need examples of what I mean, just browse Language Log for a bit. The good souls there have spilled billions of pixels striving to debunk as much nonsense as they can, and yet it just keeps coming. Particularly depressing is the numbing regularity with which you see the same canards resurface (e.g. talking pets, sex differences in the brain, etc.) and the same blitheness with which the experts are misunderstood each time.

I'm reminded of snousle's frequent comments on the theme of what makes science hard: it's not the language the concepts are explained in, it's the concepts themselves. The most important scientific discoveries are painfully counterintuitive; we believe them not because the conform to our preconceptions nor out of blind faith, but because rigourous application of the scientific method consistently shows them to be valid. This isn't less true of fields like behavioural psychology or linguistics simply by dint of their being less "hard" than nuclear physics or microbiology.

Given this, jargon is not only an important tool for experts to state what they mean precisely but also an important reminder to non-experts that the nature of these things is not what they think it is. For instance, "phonemes" are a qualitatively different concept than "sounds" or "letters" and can't be reduced to either; the sooner a neophyte accepts that, the closer they are to understanding how language really works. Jargon is vitally important in the struggle to keep people (both within and without the field) from interpreting everything according to their "folk models"; so why do people keep trying to take it away from us?

Also, he misspells "Kabardian" as "Kakardian". Repeatedly. Maybe that's an error introduced by a copyeditor but even so, what the hell?

Comments

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

All specialised fields need their own vocabulary but I try to use it as little as possible when explaining a single concept or a limited overview of the subject to a layman. One of the major uses of "jargon" is to help practioners of the field talk more concisely and more exactly, after all. If someone outside the field really wants to get into it naturally they have to learn the jargon because it's the foundation for explaining more advanced concepts.

Sometimes the terms do help cement the idea and here's an example from programming. "Re-entrant" means a bit of software can call other code to help do its work and that code can in turn call the first bit of software so it "re-enters" itself indirectly. And as a contrasting example, "virtual function" or "late binding" don't really help to describe what's actually going on, which is that whereas normally you figure out which bit of code a function call should go to when you write the software, sometimes you want to have a different bit of code for different versions of an object and every time the code actually runs you figure out which sort of object it's referring to (which could be different from run to run) and go to the code associated with that object.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

It could be worse: Kardashian

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Kabardian is infamous for having 48 consonants but only two phonemic vowels. What would Kardashian be infamous for?

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Having a terrible unwatchable show on television?

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

Inflicting horror on home viewing audiences.

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

Boobs & Buns

[snousle.livejournal.com]

There is still a legitimate complaint against unnecessary jargon, which is prevalent in many sciences. Obviously you need to use terms of the art, but I've seen many authors go way beyond that, making their writing utterly opaque even to experts. Not everyone strives for clarity, and most can still do better at it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I agree, but my beef is with the automatic equation of "jargon" with "unnecessary jargon"--as if there's never an excuse for using specialist terminology before a general audience.

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

You've hit on one reason (unintentionally) why Sarah Palin is so successful.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking a lot about teaching linguistics and the difference between students who are willing to go *to* the material (stretch their understandings and redefine their worldviews to incorporate new perspectives and information) and the students who succeed in "understanding" the material by bringing it to them (translating the terms, evidence and examples into comfortably familiar frameworks). What you say here (besides generally being stuff I agree with, except the shot at pomo theory :-) ) resonates with that a lot-- if you fall into the latter category, technical terms are needlessly obscuring concepts that are equally clear in other language. It's only if you've done the work redefining your internal mental models that the new language seems necessary. So thank you! Hopefully this will help me to get a little closer to reaching the students with that tendency.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Q: What's the difference between Pomo baskets and PoMo theories?
A: Pomo baskets hold water!