The Purpose of Jargon
My media writing textbook has a section about various “Grammar and Style Trouble Spots,” such as subject-verb disagreements, clichés, various misused words, etc., etc. About jargon it states, “Jargon’s main purpose is to exclude those who don’t speak the jargon. In other words, those who speak the jargon (and know what it means for a company to “right-size its human resources applications”) can exclude those who don’t.”
Our author here sounds bitter. It’s as if he at one time held dreams of becoming a businessman, but couldn’t figure out the word “right-size” and was thus scorned and rejected from management. Or perhaps he was a journalist and once had the opportunity to conduct an interview with the CEO of Ford, but misunderstood some of the buzzwords and wrote such a bad article that he was fired and forced to write textbooks for a living.
Jargon doesn’t exist to exclude people; it exists to make communication easier. It’s shorthand. Do you remember your first days on the internet? You quickly had to learn what the acronyms like BRB and AFAIK and AFK and IMHO meant. Or perhaps when you’re first introduced to blogging, and you wonder what in the world “fisking” someone is. Watch ER: You’ll see people pretending to be doctors shouting acronyms at each other.
Every topic has its jargon: business (kaizen, EOQs), religion (traducianism, hyper-Calvinism), Hollywood (key grip, gaffer), computers (bus speed, XML), statistics (standard error of the mean, z-score), and yes, even journalism (skybox, key-subject blocks structure).
The point of jargon is to speed communication; it’s specialized language. Anyone is welcome to learn the vocabulary, and it’s usually not hard if you understand the concepts behind the vocabulary.
Of course, the media does have to avoid jargon, because most readers won’t understand it. That’s fine; just don’t pass blanket judgment about the motives of all those who use a specialized language–including yourself.
January 27th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
The strategic use of key company jargon is how we demonstrate to management that we’ve drunk the company koolaid.
September 22nd, 2011 at 6:05 am
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