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Combating jargon

A recent article on Yahoo! News entitled “Local councils declare war on jargon” discusses the problem of difficult language. Instead of using impenetrable and difficult phrases such as “coterminous stakeholder engagement,” people should simply say what they mean, which presumably is “talk to folks.” Or so the argument goes, as declared by those local councils named in the headline. 

 

A more commonly heard term than stakeholder these days, mentioned in the same article, is “benchmarking.” That was once used to refer to setting a level for folks to emulate. Back then, a benchmark was a noun, a thing, like a mark on some bench somewhere. But it’s now a verb just means measuring of any sort, so it has been downgraded from a useful term to nothing more than a nose-in-the-air synonym. 

 

The same sorry process has occurred in the case of “slippage.” This used to refer to deadlines that were set at one point and later had to be moved back for an honest reason. Now the same term just means a plain, vanilla delay in anything. In my experience it usually occurs due to somebody fooling around on the job rather than, say, unforeseen circumstances, acts of God, or the sky falling. The world just ain’t what she used to be.

 

All the same, saying that this sort of blather and word abuse is jargon is a bit of a misnomer. Jargon is really a horse of a different color. Let me give you an example of real jargon. When you work in electronics, say, all sorts of devices have to be connected to other devices.  There are connectors with prongs (goodies that poke out) and there are others with sockets (goodies with holes). For those of us who don’t deal with these things on a day-to-day basis, both sets are just “plugs.” But for those in the business, the two sets must be carefully distinguished so that there’s a way to talk about them. The word for the poking out type, the pronged connector, is “male.”  The other type, the one with the hole(s) is “female.”

 

I burst out laughing the first time I heard this, from a fellow with whom I live and who works with electronics on a daily basis, because he is also prone to pulling a person’s leg from time to time. But it wasn’t a joke. The point is, that’s a bit of real jargon, namely, specialized vocabulary not shared by everybody who speaks the language.

 

I can give a hint of a second example. If you raise beasties for a living, you probably have a different sort of jargon. To me, any sort of pig is a pig, no matter whether it’s young or old, male or female. But to my granny, who grew up on a farm, and whose family kept pigs at times, there is a whole family of piggy words to distinguish these critters. A lady pig is a sow while her husband pig is a boar hog. The little baby is a piglet. The shoat comes in there somewhere in between, but I become deplorably vague about that point. Most of the barnyard beasties are the same way in my granny’s speech. She knows the all the critical differences among bulls, oxen, cows, heifers, and calves, for example. To me, those are all just a bunch of big and little cows. So, there is barnyard jargon that I’m just barely cognizant of as well as electronics jargon. Virtually every field has its own jargon, though some have only a little and others have big, fat dictionaries full of it.

 

What I most object to is the type of invented-on-the-spot jargon that comes up when the computer demands code words before it lets me open up a bit of software that I’ve paid big bucks for. Then, when I’ve laboriously typed in some silly bit of computerese that I didn’t really want to share with that demented gerbil in the first place, it has the effrontery to come back with the insulting statement that the code was invalid! Say, what?! This bit of linguistic nonsense didn’t even exist until I made it up on the spot a moment ago. How dare this upstart of a machine tell me it’s not valid! I think I should be the one to decide whether it’s valid or not! What does a mechanical rodent know about validity anyhow? Does this beastly device mean to imply that it actually has some evidence that I’m not me today? Is it saying it wants to argue with me on the basis of some bizarre sort of logic that I’ve ceased to be myself suddenly and therefore should no longer be allowed to use the software that I paid for?

 

Adobe has so far been the worst of the offenders, refusing me preemptively, the very first time I tried to open some brand-spanking-new software (the latest and fanciest version of Photoshop, which I only bought because I also got a new camera, due to the untimely demise of two previous computers and an earlier digital camera, now doubt all the fault of that fiendish, bug-eyed gerbil). My e-mail is too old and my password too unfamiliar, even though it’s the same one I’ve always used in communicating with Adobe with previous versions of Photoshop. That’s probably the whole problem. Not only must I buy yet a third version of the software now, no doubt I’ll have to open a new e-mail account, invent yet another password, take on an assumed name, lie about my age, discover an undiscovered country, and try speaking a whole different language to circumvent Adobe’s inventively wicked hamster of a system. Then and only then may I be allowed to open that ridiculous program. Then I’d be willing to bet it won’t open that old photo on my desktop, the one of my two doggies, the one with the ear infection and the one with the bad teeth. It’s almost enough to send an old lady back to the Bronze Age!

 

The moral of the story is, I would have spent more time telling you about jargon, but I wasted nearly the whole afternoon trying to open one little picture of two small dogs, all to no avail. I was going to tell you about Cleopatra, too, but she wouldn’t come over from AP photos either, disguised as Elizabeth Taylor, and Zahi Hawass with the sarcophagi he discovered earlier this year, which would have made an even better picture, told me he was downloading to my desktop, also from AP photos, but failed to materialize, after three hours of battle. 

 

So if you want to see the dogs, you’ll just have to visit Diana on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/dianagainer ) because I never succeeded in dragging the dogs hither. I only have a first name on MySpace due to an earlier defeat by a previous computer which was only half as evil, since it was run by XP instead of VISTA (the swine!). But you can see the beasties in my photos there in the album called doggies. They’re the only critters in that folder although there are other folders which I’m sure you’d rather not look at. Well, I’d rather you didn’t look in there since I’m in them, looking deplorable. Triskit has the ear infection and Joe needs his teeth cleaned, in case you’re interested.