English Language Jargon Quotes

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not what you would expect from "a prisonhouse of thought." That is why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.

There are five species of Pacific salmon in North America: the chum, the coho, the sockeye, the pink, and the Chinook. Each has its own diminutive: the chum is the dog, or the keta, the coho the silver, the sockeye the red, the pink the humpy, and the Chinook is the king. The original Chinook are people of the Pacific Northwest, and their language formed the core of Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trading language that stretched from Alaska to the Columbia River, along what now forms the border of Washington and Oregon, and incorporated the words of many tribes, as well as French and English. Any Canadian will still say Chinook for king, the best and biggest of the fish that the Chinook people traded.

The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEO's, talk of "business plans" and "return on investment," as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or to research. But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic. To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to "property" and education to training for the "job market." If, on the contrary, [Sir Albert] Howard was right in his belief that health is the "one great subject," then a unifying aim and a common critical standard are clearly implied. Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with "wholeness"), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds. If a university began to assume responsibility for the health of its place and its local constituents, then all of its departments would have a common aim, and they would have to judge their place and themselves and one another by a common standard. They would need one another's knowledge. They would have to communicate with one another; the diversity of specialists would have to speak to one another in a common language. And here again Howard is exemplary, for he wrote, and presumably spoke, a plain, vigorous, forthright English-- no jargon, no condescension, no ostentation, no fooling around.

Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.” Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon. In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy. “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.

Orwell usually wrote as an observer, but here he is a prescriber, laying down rules and offering advice. A careful writer, he instructs, should ask himself about every sentence a series of questions, such as what he is trying to say and what words will best express it. He should be especially careful about using stale, worn-out imagery that fails to really evoke an image in the reader’s mind. He summarizes his points succinctly, offering six “elementary” rules: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Any writer today would do well to post those rules on the wall of his or her work space. Less noted about the essay is that it isn’t simply against bad writing, it is suspicious of what motivates such prose. He argues that writing that is obscure, dull, and Latinate is made that way for a purpose—generally, in order to disguise what is really happening. “Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” So, he writes memorably, in one of his best passages anywhere: Defenceless villages are

Question 6 Why is it that in America, challenging the role of money in politics is by definition a revolutionary act? The principle behind buying influence is that money is power and power is, essentially, everything. It’s an idea that has come to pervade every aspect of our culture. Bribery has become, as a philosopher might put it, an ontological principle: it defines our most basic sense of reality. To challenge it is therefore to challenge everything. I use the word "bribery" quite self-consciously--and again, the language we use is extremely important. As George Orwell long ago reminded us, you know you are in the presence of a corrupt political system when those who defend it cannot call things by their proper names. By theses standards the contemporary United States is unusually corrupt. We maintain an empire that cannot be referred to as an empire, extracting tribute that cannot be referred to as tribute, justifying it in termes of an economic ideology (neoliberalism) we cannot refer to at all. Euphemisms and code words pervade every aspect of public debate. This is not only true of the right, with military terms like "collateral damage" (the military is a vast bureaucracy, so we expect them to use obfuscatory jargon), but on the left as well. Consider the phrase "human rights abuses." On the surface this doesn’t seem like it’s covering up very much: after all, who in their right mind would be in favor of human rights abuses? Obviously nobody; but ther are degrees of disapproval here, and in this case, they become apparent the moment one begins to contemplate any other words in the English language that might be used to describe the same phenomenon normally referred to by this term. Compare the following sentences: - "I would argue that it is sometimes necessary to have dealings with, or even to support, regimes with unsavory human rights records in order to further our vital strategic imperatives." - "I would argue that it is sometimes necessary to have dealings with, or even to support, regimes that commit acts of rape, torture, and murder in order to further out vital strategic imperatives." Certainly the second is going to be a harder case to make. Anyone hearing it will be much more likely to ask, "Are these strategic imperatives really that vital?" or even, "What exactly is a ’strategic imperative’ anyway?" There is even something slightly whiny-sounding about the term "rights." It sounds almost close to "entitlements"--as if those irritating torture victims are demanding something when they complain about their treatment. (p. 110-112)

Pym argues that highly specialized technical texts are typically embedded in an international community of scientists, engineers, physicians, lawyers, and the like, who attend international conferences and read books in other languages an so have usually eliminated from their discourse the kind of contextual vagueness that is hardest to translate. As Pym's "tomography" example shows, too, international precision tends to be maintained in specialist groups through the use of Greek, Latin, French, and English terms that change only slightly as they move from one phonetic system to another. "General" texts, on the other hand, are grounded in less closely regulated everyday usage, the way people talk in a wide variety of ordinary contexts, which requires far more social knowledge than specialized texts - far more knowledge of how people talk to each other in their different social groupings, at home, at work, at the store, etc. Even slang and jargon, Pym would say, are easier to translate than this "general" discourse - all you have to do to translate slang or jargon is find an expert in it and ask your questions. (What makes that type of translation difficult is that experts are sometimes hard to find.) With a "general" text, everybody's an expert - but all the experts disagree, because they've used the words or phrases in different situations, different contexts, and can never quite sort out in their own minds just what it means with this or that group.

The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax. My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results. I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. —Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306

Jargon is the replacement for the naturally metaphorical vernacular of the people. If their speech reflects their thinking, then there are many professionals and politicians, trade union leaders and civil servants who know not what they do. They are not merely neglecting a glorious heritage of wonderful language; they are obscuring the paths of truth.

Cherokee, the name by which they are commonly known, has no meaning in their own language, and seems to be of foreign origin. As used among themselves the form is Tsa′lg′ or Tsa′rg′. It first appears as Chalaque in the Portuguese narrative of De Soto’s expedition, published originally in 1557, while we find Cheraqui in a French document of 1699, and Cherokee as an English form as early, at least, as 1708. The name has thus an authentic history of 360 years. There is evidence that it is derived from the Choctaw word choluk or chiluk, signifying a pit or cave, and comes to us through the so-called Mobilian trade language, a corrupted Choctaw jargon formerly used as the medium of communication among all the tribes of the Gulf states, as far north as the mouth of the Ohio (2).

A further difficulty in understanding such early texts is that their translation can only be accomplished by reference to other, later texts. And here a paradox arises, for to assume that Metjen’s inscriptions are merely ‘primitive’ versions of later similar examples, and that gaps in their understanding may be resolved by reference to the fuller texts of later times serves to deny internal change within a society that, in Sneferu’s day, was clearly undergoing a series of colossal transformations. It is the very nature of most grammars and dictionaries, moreover, to provide compacted, generalizing visions of the language of the culture in which they deal and this, as far as the traditional vision of ‘ancient Egypt’ is concerned, has created a jargon-filled vocabulary with its own internal mythologies, so that, however rigorous or erudite the act of translation may have been, it often serves to bewitch the genuine relics of the past and reinforce a vision of an ‘ancient Egypt’ held by earlier generations of lexicographers and philologists. That, of course, is how Metjen can appear to be like an English squire, and Imhotep, an Egyptian Leonardo

While Protestants preferred Natives learn English, Catholics tackled the difficult native languages. At the Dalles mission, Father Louis-Pierre Rousseau translated Bible lessons, prayers, and children's songs into Chinook jargon, a hybrid of English, French, Chinook, and hand signs developed to conduct trade. Native Peoples memorized the Our Father, Hail Mary, the lengthy Apostles' Creed, and the Ten Commandments.

The right and the left share another important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely subversive. Kimbal takes the radical claims of the academic left at face value. He does not object to the tenured radicals because they are more interested in tenure than in radicalism. He objects to them because, in his view, they use the security of their academic positions to attack the foundations of social order. [...] Now, instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. No doubt, they would like to think so; but their activities do not seriously threaten corporate control of the universities. And, it is corporate control - not academic radicalism - that has corrupted our higher education. It is corporate control that has diverted social resources from the humanities into military and technological research; fostered an obsession with quantification that has destroyed the social sciences, replaced the English language with bureaucratic jargon, and created a top-heavy administrative apparatus, whose educational vision begins and ends with the bottom line.

The goal of American English speakers appears to be to rob the mother tongue of direct meaning and replace it with needlessly-complex jargon.