Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. I remember the moment when, as a Ph.D. student in comparative literature, I casually dropped the phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel. What power! From the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of my fellow students around the seminar table, I knew that I had just flashed the golden badge that admitted me into an elite disciplinary community. Needless to say, my new party trick fell flat on my nonacademic friends and relations. Whenever I solemnly intoned the word “Foucauldian,” they quickly went off to find another beer.
In its most benign and neutral definition, jargon signifies “the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group.” More often, however, the jingly word that Chaucer used to describe “the inarticulate utterance of birds” takes on a pejorative cast: “unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing”; “nonsense, gibberish”; “a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect”; “obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words.” So when does technical terminology cross over into the realm of outlandish, obscure, and pretentious? And how can academics communicate effectively with one another without exposing themselves to the contempt, derision, or irritation of those who do not understand them?
Many thoughtful and eloquent academics have defended the use of jargon in appropriate contexts. Derek Attridge observes that jargon makes transparent what other modes of critical discourse seek to hide, namely, the contingent and contextualized nature of language itself. Roland Barthes describes jargon as “a way of imagining” that “shocks as imagination does.” Jacques Derrida, whose exuberantly neologistic prose has charmed and exasperated several generations of humanities scholars, dwells on the material pleasures of difficult language, noting that words like “jargon” and its cousin, “argot,” are chokingly ugly yet bizarrely sensual: “They both come from the bottom of the throat, they linger, for a certain time, like a gargling, at the bottom of the gullet, you rasp and you spit.” (“Ils sorbent tours deux du fond de la gorge, ils séjournent, un certain temps, come un gargarisme, au fond du goosier, on racle et on crache.”) What these commentators have in common is a deep respect for language that engages and challenges. None of them advocate lazy or pretentious writing—which, all too often, is what disciplinary jargonizing amounts to.
In his classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell demonstrates how any writer can turn powerful prose into mushy pablum—"modern English of the worst sort"—by replacing evocative nouns and resonant cadences with impersonal, abstract terminology:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.” (Orwell’s translation into standard bureaucrat-speak)
The annals of academe are filled with examples of hoaxes based on parodies of scholarly discourse, from the fake “Spectrism” poetry movement of the 1920s to the infamous Sokal affair of the 1990s, in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully placed “an article liberally salted with nonsense” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text and then publicly boasted about his feat. As Sokal demonstrated, a satirist with a finely tuned ear can simulate the signature style of just about any academic discipline. So, indeed, can a cleverly programmed computer. The following passages were generated by online “chatterbots” designed to parrot the prose of postmodernists, computer scientists, and the linguist Noam Chomsky, respectively:
“The main theme of von Ludwig’s analysis of postsemioticist rationalism is a mythopoetical totality.”
“After years of theoretical research into flip-flop gates, we prove the analysis of massive multiplayer online role-playing games, which embodies the confirmed principles of fuzzy networking.”
“Note that the speaker-hearer’s linguistic intuition does not readily tolerate nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory.”
Based on fairly simple algorithms, each of these programs conjures up the kind of muddy, obscurantist prose that Orwell likened to the defensive response of “a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” But it is their heavy-handed jargon—"postsemioticist,” “mythopoetical,” “flip-flop gates,” “fuzzy networking,” “nondistinctness,” “feature theory"—that most clearly marks these sentences as “academic.”
In my survey of 100 recent writing guides, I found that 21 recommend against disciplinary jargon of any kind; 46 caution that technical language should be used carefully, accurately, and sparingly; and 33 make no comment on the subject. I have yet to discover a single academic-style guide that advocates a freewheeling embrace of jargon. Nevertheless, academic journals are awash in the stuff:
“Tomita extended LR parsing, not by backtracking and lookahead but by a breadth-first simulation of multiple LR parsers spawned by nondeterminism in the LR table.” (computer science)
“Moreover, central aspects of Holland’s theory are structurally represented in the RIASEC interest circumflex wherein an explicit set of relations between variables in the interest domain are specified.” (psychology)
“By bringing deconstructive techniques to political philosophy, a theoretical discourse of rationality and self-control is forced to come to terms with the metaphorical, catachrestical, and fabulistic materials buried within it.” (literary studies)
These extracts all appeared in articles with “jargonicity ratios” of 1:10 or higher; that is, their authors employ specialized terminology on average once in every 10 words, if not more. Only the first example, a vigorously phrased if otherwise incomprehensible sentence from a computer-science article, stands up to syntactical scrutiny. In the other two sentences, jawbreakers such as “circumflex” and “catachrestical” momentarily distract us from serious grammatical errors: In the psychology article, a singular noun (“set”) is modified by a plural verb (“are”), while the literary-studies extract opens with a dangling participle (“by bringing"—who brings?) and closes with an ambiguous “it” (“philosophy” or “discourse”?). If the authors of those sentences are so intoxicated by big words that they cannot keep their own syntax walking in a straight line, what chance do their readers have?
In many academic contexts, jargon functions as a highly efficient form of disciplinary shorthand: phrases such as “non-HACEK gram-negative bacillus endocarditis” (medicine) or “unbounded demonic and angelic nondeterminacy” (computer science) may be unintelligible to ordinary mortals, but they facilitate efficient communication among disciplinary experts (or so they assure me).
Sometimes, however, the line between technical precision and intellectual pretension becomes a fine one.
Take the word “Foucauldian,” which I employed satirically at the beginning of this chapter as an example of potentially off-putting jargon. In my 1,000-article data sample, I found 18 articles from humanities and social-science journals that mention the cultural theorist Michel Foucault at least once within their first few pages. Seven of these articles contain the F-word in its adjectival form, variously invoking: from higher education, “Foucauldian theory,” “a Foucauldian analysis of power,” and “the Foucauldian interplay between ‘constraint’ and ‘agency’”; from literary studies, “a Foucauldian understanding of the operations of power and the repressive hypothesis” and “Foucauldian assumptions about genre as an agentless discourse”; and from history, “the Foucauldian concept of ‘discourse’” and a “Foucauldian direction” of thought.
Four of the articles lay claim to Foucauldian ideas, while the other three challenge Foucauldian paradigms. Only two of the seven articles, however, actually engage with Foucault’s work in any meaningful way: In one, the authors claim that “Foucauldian theory lays the groundwork for the methodological approach used in this investigation,” but it turns out that their understanding of “Foucauldian theory” has been gleaned almost entirely from a 1994 book on Foucault and feminism. In the other, the authors repeatedly refer to Foucault’s work on imperialist discourse, but only as refracted through the writings of Edward Said.
None of the seven articles provide evidence that its authors have actually read and engaged with Foucault’s work themselves. Far from being wielded by these scholars as a precise instrument to facilitate a nuanced understanding among experts, the word “Foucauldian” becomes a sort of semantic shotgun, scattering meaning in all directions.
Stylish academic writers do not deny the utility of jargon, nor do they eschew its intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Instead they deploy specialized language gracefully, cautiously, and meticulously, taking care to keep their readers on board. For example, when the educational researchers Ray Land and Sian Bayne appropriate the Foucauldian term “panopticon” in a discussion of disciplinary surveillance in online learning environments, they provide a succinct historical overview of the concept, grounded in Foucault’s own writings. When the literary critic Peter Brooks imports the Russian formalist terms fabula and sjuzet into his book Reading for the Plot, he deftly glosses both terms and explains how they contribute to a deeper understanding of stories and plots. When the philosopher Jacques Derrida coins a word, différance, to signify semantic differences that lead to an endless deferral of meaning, he explains at length the thinking behind his neologism. These authors hand their readers complex tools—but always with instructions attached.
Academics turn to jargon for a wide variety of reasons: to display their erudition, to signal membership in a disciplinary community, to demonstrate their mastery of complex concepts, to cut briskly into a continuing scholarly conversation, to push knowledge in new directions, to challenge readers’ thinking, to convey ideas and facts efficiently, to play around with language. Many of those motivations align well with the ideals of stylish academic writing. Wherever jargon shows its shiny face, however, the demon of academic hubris inevitably lurks in the shadows nearby. Academics who are committed to using language effectively and ethically—as a tool for communication, not as an emblem of power—need first of all to acknowledge the seductive power of jargon to bamboozle, obfuscate, and impress.
Things to Try:
If you suspect that you suffer from jargonitis, start by measuring the scope of your addiction. Print out a sample of your academic writing and highlight every word that would not be immediately comprehensible to a reader from outside your own discipline. (Alternatively, you can ask such a reader to do the highlighting for you.) Do you use jargon more than once per page, per paragraph, per sentence?
Next, ask yourself some hard questions about your motivations. Do you employ jargon to:
- Impress other people?
- Signal your membership in a disciplinary community?
- Demonstrate your mastery of complex ideas?
- Enter an academic conversation that is already under way?
- Play with language and ideas?
- Create new knowledge?
- Challenge your readers’ thinking?
- Communicate succinctly with colleagues?
Retain only those jargon words that clearly serve your priorities and values.
For every piece of jargon that you decide to keep, make sure you give your readers a secure handhold: a definition, some background information, a contextualizing word or phrase. By the time you have clarified your usage, you might even find that you can let go of the word itself.
