Learning to Use Jargon

Possibly every discipline has some form of jargon unique to itself, irrespective of whether it revels in flaunting it, lives uneasily with its existence, or even subtly tries to hide it as much as possible. Consequently, there is an entire spectrum of opinions regarding the use/abuse or the necessity/redundancy of jargon : for some, a report is readable only if it is couched in the appropriate jargon; for others, jargon is a mild irritation or, at times, an excusable intrusion into 'plain English'; and for yet others, the use of jargon is the unspeakable heresy against the canons of straightforward language. So should we get rid of jargon with all its 'academic' pretenses and speak the 'common man's' language? In a sense, yes. There is no point in deliberately obfuscating a 'clear concept' by burdening it with recondite language that is understandable to only a select few. But the basic questions are these :

(a) Are the concepts in question really that 'clear'?

(b) Who is the 'common man' in this context? Someone without a university education? Someone who is a journalist/engineer/farmer? Someone who does not read the newspaper?

(c) If the 'academic' world has its own pretenses, is not possible that the 'common man' too has 'his' own pretenses? The pretense of thinking that there is a necessary connection between jargon and redundancy, or even falsity?

It so happens, however, that jargon is used in disciplines such as philosophy/theology not because people who speak and live with such jargon have sinister motives in putting off other people who might wish to enter their domains, but because some of this jargon is basic to these disciplines. Here is just one example to illustrate my point.

'Hinduism is characterised by idol-worship' : a statement that has been repeated by countless anthropologists down the ages, and continues to be repeated today in some circles. Now if that apparently 'clear statement' were to be 'translated' into theological jargonese it would go as : 'The conglomeration of diverse philosophical-religious traditions referred to by the umbrella term 'Hinduism' have, as one of their characteristics, veneration to images of the divine'.

At first sight (or on a first reading), that sounds terribly verbose, and an almost unnecessary piling up of words. But why is the second statement important in certain contexts? For the following two reasons :

(a) Firstly, the first statement seems to imply that there is a monolithic entity called 'Hinduism' with a fixed set of 'defining characteristics'. The jargonese makes it clear that this is not the case with 'Hinduism' any more than it is with 'Christianity', 'atheism', 'secularisation' or 'Marxism'.

(b) Secondly, the word 'idol' has picked up negative connotations in English, and usually means an 'object of worship'. Most religious Hindus, however, do not hold the 'idol' as being literally divine in an absolute sense, and it is therefore more accurate to describe it as 'an image that is revered'.

In other words, here is an example of jargonese which far from deliberately making 'waters muddier' tries instead to shift the mud from the clear waters, and also an example of how it can promote a better understanding of a certain community's beliefs and practices. The same goes, incidentally, if one were trying to describe the elements of the world-view, for example, of Marxism. Would that really be possible without using the jargonese of 'forces of production', 'capital', 'dialectical materialism', 'reactionary', 'base-superstructure', 'the State' and so on? Indeed, in any attempt to completely do away with such jargonese one will come perilously close to misrepresenting the fundamentals of Marxist thought.

Moreover, it is largely because of the spread of 'academic' jargonese that we have now come to know why 'Mohammedanism' (a 'common man's' word!) is a wrong term for 'Islam' (Christianity is based on the divinity of Christ; Islam is not based on the 'divinity' of the Prophet); why 'atheism' is a misleading description of Buddhism (the Buddhist universe is, if anything, over-populated with gods; only that even these gods are not beyond the circle of samsara); how 'orientalism', 'patriarchy', 'imperialism', and 'globalisation' can be excavated in the most unexpected of places; when to beware of commiting fallacies such as the 'genetic', the 'pathetic' and the 'naturalistic'; and so on and on.

The above, then, is one possible perspective on the 'academic' use of jargon. Instead of being a demonstration of 'academic' arrogance, this use rather displays a certain 'academic' humility by emphasising the need to understand a world-view from the within by first learning its vocabulary and then, to the extent that is humanly possible, actually speaking it. From this perspective, then, what appears arrogant is instead the so-called 'common man's' rejection of jargonese, a rejection which now reveals itself as an impatience to listen to the 'other' in the 'other's' own language, and a demand that this language must be 'translated' into an allegedly superior 'simple language'.

Moreoever, from the jargonese point of view, one might want to know what this 'simple language' actually is. Is it English? French? Spanish? Esperanto? Or more metaphorically, is it the 'language' of secularism, Marxism, religion, or atheism? Indeed, to carry on, this demand for a putative 'simple language' could turn out to be a disguised version of the claim that the only language that is permissible is the one that can be understood, and is 'transparently clear' to everyone, in the 'naked public square.' In other words, then, it could be argued that it is precisely the 'academic' acceptance of jargonese, which seems 'exclusivist' to those oustide the Academy, that has the 'inclusivist' potentiality of keeping alive the local languages that different communities speak, and that it is the 'common man's' denunciation, in an 'exclusivist' manner, of such jargonese, through an appeal to a 'transparent language', that threatens the future existence of such languages.

Having said that, however, a few comments this time from, so to speak, the 'other side of the wall'. Firstly, am I then ruling out (a large number of) disciplines such as 'popular science', 'popular sociology', 'popular linguistics', and for that matter anything that goes by the tag of 'Popular X'? What I find objectionable is the use of the word 'popular' in such phrases which seems to imply that there exist disciplines such as 'non-popular science', 'non-popular sociology', and so on. Rather, one should dissolve this (non-existent, in my opinion) dichotomy, and simply speak of a science, a sociology, a linguistics, and so on, which may need to be expounded in different contexts to different audiences in different ways. There is nothing intrinsically 'non-popular' about a theorem in pure mathematics that a student is trying to solve for her PhD; indeed, it may so happen that thousands of mathematicians all around the world are presently trying to solve it, and surely that would count as a 'popular' enterprise. Similarly, there is nothing inherently 'popular' about a seven-to-nine job in a multinational software company in an urban capital; millions of people stay away from such jobs, for whatever reasons, and they are none the worse for that.

Suppose, for example, the essential principles of Quantum Mechanics are being explained to an audience of anthropologists who have not had a rigorous university education in higher physics. Instead of calling this 'popular science' (with its associated implication that those who do a PhD in Quantum Mechanics are being subject to a dose of 'un-popular science'), one could simply say that the difference between the two cases is a difference not of 'content' but of 'form'. That is, what is being offered to the anthropologists is an explanation of the very same fundamentals of QM which would be explained to students in a university classroom, with the exception that the speaker in the latter can take for granted a wider 'epistemic background' that s/he cannot in the former. Consequently, though the 'content' remains the same in both cases, the manner in which this content is presented, that is, the 'form', has to change with the audience. Therefore, one still talks about Heisenberg and Schrodinger (the 'content'), but not necessarily using the same terminology (the 'form'). To be sure, the dangers of 'being lost in translation' always exist, but such dangers do not make it impossible to explain QM to different audiences.

Secondly, the importance of jargonese lies in its ability to condense volumes of text into a short precise sentence and to prevent undue repetition, but precisely therein lies its greatest danger. Too often the 'academic' world turns inwards into itself, and then the correct use of jargon itself begins to be regarded as the supreme accomplishment, so that the highest laurels are awarded to those who are the most efficient in the usage of such jargonese. It is against such misapplication of jargonese that the 'common man's' complaint is justified. Post-modernism, for example, defines itself as a reaction to and a rejection of the 'grand narratives' of 'high modernity', narratives that come packed with a dense package of jargonese. Ironically enough, however, post-modernism itself has now become burdened with its own kind of jargonese, so that it is impossible to read through a post-modernist text without first becoming highly skilled in using its vocabulary.

The debate over jargon, therefore, touches on the vaster question of 'elitism versus populism'. Should knowledge/art/music/power/authority be the privilege of a select few, or should these be made universally available (at least, at the 'formal level')? In our 'egalitarian' world, we have largely come to accept the latter option as the correct one, and rightly so, in my opinion. However, I shall conclude with one example to show why even people who seem to accept the latter option should beware of constructing their individual micro-universes from which they then, ironically, attempt to block off others. What is called pop/rock music kicked off as a kind of reaction to the alleged restrictiveness of (Western) classical music's rules of harmony, composition, and so on. Instead of the latter's emphasis on 'rigour', many pop/rock musicians rallied to the cry of 'spontaneity'. What happened, in fact, was that over time pop/rock music itself became a micro-universe spinning out its own system of rules laying down what is allowed and what is not. So much so that today we have a form of music that labels itself as 'alternative rock', with the implication that it is a rejection of the 'rigorousness' of the earlier forms of rock, which can perhaps be called, if the oxymoron is allowed, 'classical rock'.