A Paucity of Information, a Plethora of Words
Now let’s examine the fifth and final category of abusage: jargon (JAHR-gun, rhymes with bargain). As you may recall from our discussion of this word early in the program, jargon (word 46 of Level 1) denotes a specialized, abstruse vocabulary or any pretentious language that is unnecessarily difficult to understand.
Jargon is the worm in the apple of expression; it is the refuge of the timid writer and the smokescreen of the self-important one. The dense, inscrutable vocabulary of jargon excludes the average reader or listener. Whenever you read or hear jargon, you may reasonably assume that somebody doesn’t want you to understand what’s being expressed or is trying to disguise the dearth of content in the words.
Let me give you some examples. Here’s the second sentence from the sales brochure passage I quoted earlier in our discussion of adverbiage: “People learn best when the instruction is designed so that it facilitates the learning process and when they thoroughly enjoy the learning activity.” That twenty-three-word sentence, translated into simple and direct English, can be expressed in seven words: “People learn best when learning is fun.”
The pernicious thing about jargon is that once you start using it, it warps your mind—or, to borrow a line from one of my favorite folk songs, “it will form like a habit and seep in your soul.” If some clearheaded person had suggested that seven-word clarification to the writer of the brochure, the writer probably would have said, “No, that’s too plain. It doesn’t have enough oomph. We need to make the company and its courses sound more important. Hey, I know! Suppose I throw in the word facilitate? That’s a big favorite among educators. And let’s make learning sound more technical and scientific by calling it ‘the learning process’ and ‘the learning activity.’ Then if I refer to what we teach as ‘designed instruction’…”
Ah, me oh my. Such is the self-deluding sophistry that leads us, as usage expert Theodore M. Bernstein puts it, “to wrap a paucity of information in a plethora of words.”
Later in the same brochure the writer shifts into high-flown gear and we find this pseudoscientific, jargon-infested sentence: “Analysis,” it reads, “involves scoping the nature of the instructional requirements and specifying the tasks, the logistical support, and the instructional management system necessary to achieve goals within the unique constraints of the client’s environment.”
Can you believe this stuff? In plain English, all that means is “We create courses that fit your needs.”
Everyone agrees that the best writing is simple and direct, but when it’s time to put our thoughts on paper, most of us become like the person who shakes salt on his food before tasting it. We overseason our sentences with jargon, vogue words, redundancies, adverbiage, and clichés, until our ideas lose their natural flavor and our expression becomes flat, verbose, and dull. As the poet Donald Hall once wrote, “In our culture, lethargic prose is taken as evidence of seriousness or sincerity. The heavier the subject, the paler the prose.”
To illustrate Hall’s point, let’s take a familiar passage from I Corinthians, Chapter 13, in the King James Version of the Bible: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Here’s how those poetic words would be expressed in today’s nebulous, unmetaphorical, bombastic, and jargon-riddled English: “Despite the fact that my communication skills have been testmarketed and proven to be completely effective in a variety of goal-oriented management environments, if I have not developed the crucial ability to personally interact with fellow colleagues in a highly sensitized manner, nonterrestrial data suggest that my interactive verbal processing ability will not have a positive impact outcome-wise at this point in time, even in a win-win situation.”
I hope that outrageous mishmash of overwriting and abusage made you chuckle. The problem is, many educated people write and even speak like that. But enough said. I’m sure that by now you get the point: Eschew jargon and say what you mean.
And with that succinct counsel—and I trust you pronounced succinct suhk-SINGKT, with the cc like k-s—we come to the end of Level 7. I know that all along I’ve been drumming the importance of review into your head, but another nudge in the right direction never hurts. To ensure full comprehension and retention of what you have learned, do yourself a favor and review this entire level at least once before moving on.
