| 词组 | jargon |
| 释义 | jargon Chaucer used jargon to mean the twittering of birds; the word has declined in status since then. The OED shows that it embarked upon its career as a pejorative term in the 17th century. According to Perrin & Ebbitt 1972, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his On the Art of Writing (1916), popularized the word as an all-purpose bludgeon for various kinds of verbal fuzziness. Sir Arthur's treatment would hardly pass muster nowadays for an investigation of jargon; he wanders too easily from the subject. Much more to the point is the chapter in Bolinger 1980. In modern use jargon is a pejorative term meaning more or less "obscure and often pretentious language." This meaning is very closely related to another: "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group." The pejorative meaning represents the outsider's opinion of the specialist's or insider's technical terminology. The technical usages have their defenders: • Specialized wording selectively employed between colleagues and co-workers is no blight. It is, in fact, preferable for quick, accurate messages. Jargon is not prone to double meanings —Mary C. Bromage, Michigan Business Rev., July 1968 • Scientists use jargon because they are obsessed with the desire to show that their work really does belong within a reputable context; they feel that it must conform to the conventions of the particular audience to which it is directed, and that they must use the appropriate technical language of the subject, however clumsy and contrived this may seem to the outsider —J. M. Ziman, Nature, 25 Oct. 1969 Let the outsider beware, then. If you are going to pry into material written for the specialist, you are going to have to learn the specialist's language. Of course many outsiders resent having to learn the language—and not without some reason. The defenders of jargon may point out that it eliminates ambiguities and is the quickest way for one professional to talk to another, but there is good reason to suspect that part of the function of jargon is to keep outsiders in the dark. The beginnings of this function can be found in the Renaissance. As new knowledge accumulated, those who possessed it felt some proprietary right in it. Their protective jargon was Latin: • However, when professional secrets might be revealed by the use of a tongue comprehensible to any "man in the street," it was a different matter. Priests, lawyers, and doctors all had specialised knowledge, which many of them did not wish to have made generally accessible. They had a common language, Latin, which served them very well for professional cryptolalia. To expound trade-secrets in the vernacular was to betray one's cause and one's fellow-practitioners. Consequently, during the sixteenth century, various ordinances were passed against the writing of medical or legal treatises in any language except Latin. The great sixteenth-century French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (ca. 1510-1590) was strongly criticised for publishing his works in French, and was brought to court by his fellow-doctors for doing so —Robert A. Hall, Jr., The External History of the Romance Languages, 1974 Latin is gone now as the language of learning, but in the vernacular languages, jargon can serve a similar purpose: • One enemy of communication is jargon, which can be used contemptuously or even sadistically, to reinforce the majesty of the scientific message and the layman's sense of exclusion from a privileged body of knowledge —Times Literary Supp., 27 June 1968 The jargon that is most likely to distress the ordinary person is that used by governments; few citizens these days can avoid directly confronting bureaucratic jargon in such places as tax returns and other official forms that must be dealt with. Consequently, bureaucratic jargon has probably drawn more hostile criticism than any other jargon. It has even been attacked by politicians from Sir Winston Churchill to Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige. It made a career for Sir Ernest Gowers, who was hired to help English bureaucrats simplify their jargon. His original Plain Words (1948) has passed through at least two subsequent enlargements and will undoubtedly see more. And British official prose, like its American counterpart, will march on in majestic disregard of all suggestions for improvement. Bureaucratic jargon is the official language bureaucrats write for bureaucrats to read. If you need the official approval of a bureaucrat, you will probably have to learn how to cope with the idiom. It is not going away. We do not intend to apologize for jargon, but to be fair you have to recognize that many of its critics simply refuse to understand it. For one small example, Barzun 1980 disparages the word containerize as unnecessary jargon. Not needed, he says, since we already have the verb to box. He then goes on to explain that box wouldn't do because, as he mockingly suggests, "it wouldn't have sounded like the heroic, scientific conquest of mind over matter." He omits to notice that box (or for that matter crate or package or wrap or carton) was not used because it does not mean the same thing to people in the business as containerize does. As Harper 1985 says, "Containerize is among the least objectionable of the 'ize' coinages of recent years because it was a result of the development of a new method of shipping cargo and thus serves a real need." Willful misunderstanding is no corrective to jargon. |
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