Fantastic read. Somewhat related, somewhat tangential, one of my posts will be about (with imprecise measures of tongue and cheek) "the etymological fossil record" of "Classification warfare." Most words that now have reductive implications originally had the inverse sentiment or context in its etymology. Words like quaint, trite, contrived, trivial, arbitrary, mere and mundane all had positive implications or neutral-to-positive use cases.
For example, "trivial" comes from Trivium which is literally a common meeting place or common ground (where roads intersect). However, if you trivialize the common people as "commoners," the implication is clearly bad. Ironically, common ground is now valuable because of its... uh... rarity.
Similarly, "arbitrary" came from arbiters arbitrating, a use case which still survives. An arbiter has a specialized role as an umpire or mediator, and therefore relies on trust in their professional opinion. But something that is arbitrary is contrived as if by "mere opinion," and may be no better than any other random opinion. Such a link might seem a stretch, but just look at what is happening to the words "elite" and "privilege" as is implied by your own use.
There's a way in which the rhetorical jargonificationalism manages to draw the exact attention you hope to evade, and your words will resurrect to pataphysique your obdurance.
In the same way that bad currency drives out good, bad meaning drives out good, like with Trivium/trivia as you describe.
The flip side of this phenomenon is people inventing new, "proper" terms to replace the sullied old ones. For example, elite discourse has transitioned from "homeless" to "unhoused" to "no fixed address (NFA)".
That's a great idea and application of Gresham's. Are you thinking to draw parallels of "meaning" and Fiat, representative, commodity and use valued money?
Also "mean" has a wacky unvertable etymology also, including into "means" and "meaning" which are opposed, and "average" which had opposing use cases (Calling someone "average" or "mid") to the original meaning of "shared by all, common, general."
My overarching point to be made is that modern cynicism is turning into the new naivety, trading on "hard truths" and setting the bar of trustworthiness so high that the only people to pass the purity tests are the naifs ignoring them.
And it will probably always be the case that the cost of naivety is always the next wave of cynicism, and the cost of cynicism is the next wave of naivety. Harsh ebbs and woo flows. Amen.
Great read! I've noticed in my readings lately how writers that are sparse on jargon and willing to write plainly and even informally very often inspires more confidence. The idea is strong enough to be presented in plain clothing.
I wonder if talking about language, common knowledge as in Spanish language, having technical terms for it: verbs, adjectives, nouns, tenses, semantics, grammar, orto, makes talking about common knowledge a Jargon. Like linguistic jargon.
Meh…
“Jargon is the water elites swim in.”, and sink in…
I guess then Jargon is not a thing by itself, maybe using words has a technical aspect varying in degree, as in there is common, practically, empirical use of the words as in “commonsense definition” without using like a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or another reliable source, hopefully not a Philosophy dictionary.
Like all tools: I can use a hammer so my papers are not flown by the wind… technically correct but a misuse of the common sense use of a hammer.
From chemistry, naming chemical Jargon does have ambiguity, using Jargon repeatedly, specially recursively, might lead to hidden ambiguities proliferating in detrimental ways, specially from inconsistent Jargon, like I guess most is, that leads at some point, hopefully the end of talking about, to contradictions clearly visible from a common sense view.
Let alone a strictly technical way of thinking and talking about one´s own field of “expertise”.
But sometimes by using Jargon it can lead to accepting nonsenses, or contradictions since it feels right, despite being the opposite of what is seen in reality.
That looks to me using an analogy from Logic to convince oneself and/or others an analogy of a conclusion is now obvious, evident, by following the rules of interpretation, not of Logic, called misleadingly informal logic.
So my point I think you did not elaborate is: Jargon is not consistent in most “technical” fields. Sociology, Politics and Philosophy are not Rational, but Hermeneutical.
The use of those words even in informal logic does lead to contradictions, inconsistencies. Hence they are interpreted…
I think there's an additional element of complication here, albeit in potentially less elite-ridden contexts which is the use of jargon in one's own personal writing, such as journals, poetry, note-taking and private musings.
Certainly, one ought to strive for using common sense plain English in most contexts, but presumably everyone has a baseline set of intuitive lingo - those words they commonly reach for in both unfiltered speech and internal ruminations - which doesn't exactly align to whatever we would define as "plain English" (e.g. the first 10,000 words according to Zipf's law). These individual quick-reach inventories of phrases, terms, slang and jargon will diverge more or less from a given population average (e.g. for a region, country or language group) probably according to elite-ness, but also just straight up lived experience and personal interests. The plumber who enjoys the soccer on weekends, the art student who watches lots of indie movies, and the software dev who streams esports (these are all intentional stereotypes) - they will all reach for different words, phrases and analogies when describing even the most passing mundane experience. For the most part, all three would probably be able to communicate 90% of anything important to each other, but they will inevitably use terms that may or may not be considered "jargon" by the others.
As you point out though, this difference becomes felt much more acutely across class divides, likely a function of education and the company one keeps. In many circumstances, these subconscious linguistic differences diverge sufficiently to become genuinely problematic.
But if we were to require that jargon should only be used with good enough reason, then this would rule out many of the mundane, reason-less uses of jargon that most wouldn't notice, except when they encounter those far outside their usual circles. I'd wager that there's something about this subtle (and not so subtle) differences in what is assumed to be "plain" language which itself defines the contours of certain kinds of cultural diversity.
Fantastic read. Somewhat related, somewhat tangential, one of my posts will be about (with imprecise measures of tongue and cheek) "the etymological fossil record" of "Classification warfare." Most words that now have reductive implications originally had the inverse sentiment or context in its etymology. Words like quaint, trite, contrived, trivial, arbitrary, mere and mundane all had positive implications or neutral-to-positive use cases.
For example, "trivial" comes from Trivium which is literally a common meeting place or common ground (where roads intersect). However, if you trivialize the common people as "commoners," the implication is clearly bad. Ironically, common ground is now valuable because of its... uh... rarity.
Similarly, "arbitrary" came from arbiters arbitrating, a use case which still survives. An arbiter has a specialized role as an umpire or mediator, and therefore relies on trust in their professional opinion. But something that is arbitrary is contrived as if by "mere opinion," and may be no better than any other random opinion. Such a link might seem a stretch, but just look at what is happening to the words "elite" and "privilege" as is implied by your own use.
There's a way in which the rhetorical jargonificationalism manages to draw the exact attention you hope to evade, and your words will resurrect to pataphysique your obdurance.
The etymologies were sourced from etymonline
One idea I've been meaning to write about is Gresham's Law for terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
In the same way that bad currency drives out good, bad meaning drives out good, like with Trivium/trivia as you describe.
The flip side of this phenomenon is people inventing new, "proper" terms to replace the sullied old ones. For example, elite discourse has transitioned from "homeless" to "unhoused" to "no fixed address (NFA)".
That's a great idea and application of Gresham's. Are you thinking to draw parallels of "meaning" and Fiat, representative, commodity and use valued money?
Also "mean" has a wacky unvertable etymology also, including into "means" and "meaning" which are opposed, and "average" which had opposing use cases (Calling someone "average" or "mid") to the original meaning of "shared by all, common, general."
My overarching point to be made is that modern cynicism is turning into the new naivety, trading on "hard truths" and setting the bar of trustworthiness so high that the only people to pass the purity tests are the naifs ignoring them.
And it will probably always be the case that the cost of naivety is always the next wave of cynicism, and the cost of cynicism is the next wave of naivety. Harsh ebbs and woo flows. Amen.
Great read! I've noticed in my readings lately how writers that are sparse on jargon and willing to write plainly and even informally very often inspires more confidence. The idea is strong enough to be presented in plain clothing.
I wonder if talking about language, common knowledge as in Spanish language, having technical terms for it: verbs, adjectives, nouns, tenses, semantics, grammar, orto, makes talking about common knowledge a Jargon. Like linguistic jargon.
Meh…
“Jargon is the water elites swim in.”, and sink in…
I guess then Jargon is not a thing by itself, maybe using words has a technical aspect varying in degree, as in there is common, practically, empirical use of the words as in “commonsense definition” without using like a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or another reliable source, hopefully not a Philosophy dictionary.
Like all tools: I can use a hammer so my papers are not flown by the wind… technically correct but a misuse of the common sense use of a hammer.
From chemistry, naming chemical Jargon does have ambiguity, using Jargon repeatedly, specially recursively, might lead to hidden ambiguities proliferating in detrimental ways, specially from inconsistent Jargon, like I guess most is, that leads at some point, hopefully the end of talking about, to contradictions clearly visible from a common sense view.
Let alone a strictly technical way of thinking and talking about one´s own field of “expertise”.
But sometimes by using Jargon it can lead to accepting nonsenses, or contradictions since it feels right, despite being the opposite of what is seen in reality.
That looks to me using an analogy from Logic to convince oneself and/or others an analogy of a conclusion is now obvious, evident, by following the rules of interpretation, not of Logic, called misleadingly informal logic.
So my point I think you did not elaborate is: Jargon is not consistent in most “technical” fields. Sociology, Politics and Philosophy are not Rational, but Hermeneutical.
The use of those words even in informal logic does lead to contradictions, inconsistencies. Hence they are interpreted…
I think there's an additional element of complication here, albeit in potentially less elite-ridden contexts which is the use of jargon in one's own personal writing, such as journals, poetry, note-taking and private musings.
Certainly, one ought to strive for using common sense plain English in most contexts, but presumably everyone has a baseline set of intuitive lingo - those words they commonly reach for in both unfiltered speech and internal ruminations - which doesn't exactly align to whatever we would define as "plain English" (e.g. the first 10,000 words according to Zipf's law). These individual quick-reach inventories of phrases, terms, slang and jargon will diverge more or less from a given population average (e.g. for a region, country or language group) probably according to elite-ness, but also just straight up lived experience and personal interests. The plumber who enjoys the soccer on weekends, the art student who watches lots of indie movies, and the software dev who streams esports (these are all intentional stereotypes) - they will all reach for different words, phrases and analogies when describing even the most passing mundane experience. For the most part, all three would probably be able to communicate 90% of anything important to each other, but they will inevitably use terms that may or may not be considered "jargon" by the others.
As you point out though, this difference becomes felt much more acutely across class divides, likely a function of education and the company one keeps. In many circumstances, these subconscious linguistic differences diverge sufficiently to become genuinely problematic.
But if we were to require that jargon should only be used with good enough reason, then this would rule out many of the mundane, reason-less uses of jargon that most wouldn't notice, except when they encounter those far outside their usual circles. I'd wager that there's something about this subtle (and not so subtle) differences in what is assumed to be "plain" language which itself defines the contours of certain kinds of cultural diversity.