Style: An Anti-Textbook by Lanham Richard

Author:Lanham, Richard [Lanham, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2011-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

4 The Delights of Jargon

Down with those who would refuse man the right to professional speech.

Christopher Sykes, What U-Future?

DEFINITION, SAMUEL JOHNSON reminds us in Rambler 125, stands outside the province of man. “There is scarcely any species of writing, of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents.” Imagination always outstrips our distinctions.

To attempt a definition of jargon threatens unusual dangers. Jargon bears a high and highly indignant moral charge, for one thing, and it pervades America, for another. It usually means, as the usage expert H. W. Fowler says in Modern English Usage, “talk that is considered both ugly sounding and hard to understand.” Another usage expert, Bergen Evans, reminds us that “jargon is a term of contempt and must be used carefully.” I use it more broadly to mean styles serving special groups, interests, and activities. Its exclusively pejorative flavor—it is often hard to understand because it wants to be, and by holding us at arm’s length adds offense to perplexity—blurs what it is, how it works, and why it arose.

No one can deny that America in our time has produced the finest flowering of specialist gobbledegook the planet has seen. Witness the bureaucratic mumblespeak in chapter 2. American jargon is such fun to contemplate, so full of pompous self-satisfaction on the one hand and cynical, knowing, ritual mystification on the other that description hardly knows where to begin. I choose, as in chapter 2, my own backyard, the university. Consider this passage. It comes from a famous study in sociological theory, The Social System, by a famous sociologist, Talcott Parsons:

An element of a shared symbolic system which serves as a criterion or standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation which are intrinsically open in a situation may be called a value. . . . But from this motivational orientation aspect of the totality of action it is, in view of the role of symbolic systems, necessary to distinguish a “value-orientation” aspect. This aspect concerns, not the meaning of the expected state of affairs to the actor in terms of his gratification-deprivation balance but the content of the selective standards themselves. The concept of value-orientations in this sense is thus the logical device for formulating one central aspect of the articulation of cultural traditions into the action system.

It follows from the derivation of normative orientation and the role of values in action as stated above, that all values involve what may be called a social reference. . . . It is inherent in an action system that action is, to use one phrase, “normatively oriented.” This follows, as was shown, from the concept of expectations and its place in action theory, especially in the “active” phase in which the actor pursues goals. Expectations then, in combination with the “double contingency” of the process of interaction as it has been called, create a crucially imperative problem of order. Two aspects of this problem of order may in turn be distinguished, order in the

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