Jargon

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For the glossary of hacker slang, see Jargon File.

Jargon is terminology, much like slang, that relates to a specific activity, profession, or group. It develops as a kind of shorthand, to express ideas that are frequently discussed between members of a group, and can also have the effect of distinguishing those belonging to a group from those who are not. Newcomers or those unfamiliar with a subject can often be characterized by their incorrect use of jargon, which can lead to amusing malapropisms. The use of jargon by outsiders is considered by insiders to be socially inappropriate, since it consitutes a claim to be a member of the insider group.

Jargon can be distinguished from terminology in that it is informal and essentially part of the oral culture of a profession, with only limited expression in the profession's publications. Many jargon terms have non-jargon equivalents which would be used in print or when addressing non-specialists; other jargon terms, particularly those which are used to characterise or even ridicule non-specialists, have no such equivalents. The everyday use of the word jargon to describe any technical terminology incomprehensible to the lay person ignores this distinction between jargon and terminology.

Oftentimes, people will use jargon derisively, meant to indicate disapproval with the use of words whose meaning is esoteric, and thus exclusionary of people who do not understand their meaning and background, for example in The Jargon of Authenticity by Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno. To describe an idea as jargon accomplishes in Bourdieu's terms several tasks. It maintain's the speaker's "distinction" and social role as critic and judge, while at time excusing the speaker from listening or reading with attention, and it also expresses a safe, egalitarian attitude.

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Uses of jargon

Jargon is used for instance in sports, where technical sportsman terms but also sport-related metaphors for other events in life are used by sports fans for the aforementioned purposes. Jargon is used in technical professions; see technical terminology. The rise of information technology and the Internet created many overlapping jargons used by nerds, geeks and hackers to communicate, the very proper usage of these words being a major prerequisite for inclusion in these groups. See the Jargon file.

Indeed, these meta-attitudes and this more sophisticated use of the concept of jargon is today possibly more frequent than guild-like insider jargon. As it happens, today's professional organizations have legal structures of access which enable their members to override differences in "jargon" in such a manner that doctors, and to an extent lawyers, can understand each other across national and cultural boundaries. In technical efforts across those borders, terms of art and jargon are readily resolved as part of daily life in informative conversation.

The jargon of authenticity, and the readiness to accuse the writer or speaker of jargoning, is far more common than first-order jargon today, as is the fear of guild formation and the fear of nonmonetary "insider trading" when members of a profession or para-profession collaborate, and generally, today, economic demands for results prevent this from occurring. Instead, a looser and demotic "terminology" takes hold in contexts where the midlevel fear of giving offense to powerful but aliterate outsiders (such as CEOs and politicians) overrides anything like professional solidarity or precision in speech.

The jargon of "jargoning" itself evolved from a pleasant association about the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who referred in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to the "sweet" jargoning of birds to today's usage, which is "unpleasant sounds I don't understand". This is a shift in attitude about language and mystery in which the listener and the reader demands clarity at all costs and today is unimpressed by fancy words. Coleridge was writing about unmapped regions of the globe, and unexplored regions of experience, but today, an all-pervading sense of surveillance, both directed at the common reader, and also under his power as on the Internet, makes us, perhaps, feel that any mysteries are being deliberately manufactured by "jargon".

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