Carrying on this debate which I started last week in the student cafe I am interested to know if anyone particularly in education or academic circles will admit to being confused or put off from reading certain articles/emails /journals because of the amount of JARGON used.
Is it necessary or has it become a professional necessity, not only in academia but in most professions.
I would love to hear your stories and comments.
Comments
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Its not just academia, it pervades all walks of life. In my opinion jargon is just the defence mechanism used by the so called experts to assert their superiority.New comment
I don't know whether you're talking about the the arts or sciences side, but it does seem to me that while (some) scientists bend over to make things simple for the layman, many people from the humanities spend at least as much effort making things difficult to understand. Why, I don't know, unless dressing things up in layers of jargon is a tacit admission that they don't really think that what's underneath is terribly significant in its own right.
Have you heard of the Sokal hoax? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair. That's a good one!
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Oh, I forgot - if you feel left out and want to contribute your own jargon, try here:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
It generates a short essay of plausible-sounding gibberish.
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Financial Services - try and read their regulatory rulebooks and consultation papers, they are full of jargon, double negatives and waffle. Where a simple sentence or two would do, they will use reams of waffle and still not make themselves clear. It is used as a tool to make themselves appear more clever than they actually are, and I must confess I have used this technique myself in reports to great effect! How sad though, let's get back to plain English, please!New comment
This is rather amusing - its a random sentence generator and random answer generator. http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/New comment
I do not believe it is a professional necessity, during recent dealings with solicitors I have come to the conclusion that they are taught a different language whilst qualifying and lose the ability to be able to talk in plain English - however they are dealing with the every day public. I would agree with a previous poster that corresponding in this fashion makes them appear superior to the average person.New comment
Blue sky thinking Stick to the knitting At this moment in time With all due respect Breakout meetings Role based pay allowance All of the above are blights on the English language!Response to Jargon Question
I believe each discipline has its own culture and so called jargon plays a large part of that. In the States we are big on Acronyms , and memes are a global phenomena (especially Internet memes) not limited to Academia. In the IT industry we use a whole lotta jargon which I notice many people soon get intimidated or bored with and they will shut you down real quick. But for those of us in that culture it's a natural method of communication, and so natural in fact that we tend to take it for granted and forget that lay people haven't a clue what we're on about. Over the years however I have noticed a narrowing in this gap as certain acronyms and jargon words have become a part of mainstream culture, e.g. everybody now understands the acronym LOL which about ten years ago was not the case. But everyone uses it now though and accepts it as an efficient way of expressing a particular emotion in an email, FB, posting or text etc... In the age of texting and Twitter a whole new bunch of jargon has evolved out of a necessity to succinctly convey a message using a limited number of characters. If you really want to you can uncover almost any type of jargon these days using the Internet with sites such as Urbandictionary.com and Wikipedia. For example when I first started watching Criminal Minds a decade ago I had absolutely no idea what "Unsub" meant", so guess what I looked it up in a search engine and found out that it is short for "Unidentified Subject" a term that is used by criminal investigation teams, who use it so often they shortened it to make it easier for themselves. One of my favorite pastimes is watching medical and legal dramas. and as you would expect the same jargon comes up time and again e'g tachycardia, left ventricle, blood gases etc... The point is that any type of jargon will cease to become jargon once you have researched into the meaning a little, with voice activated search engines such as Google Now, Siri and Cortana this has become super easy.