This is a post about jargon. Why does it matter? How does it work, and what can you do about it? Let’s unpack that…
History today is gone tomorrow. The event horizon is compassed by a swipe, and according to the laws of progress, we always swipe left. So far, so bad.
Yet progress has not been progressing too well. It has legalised crime. It has liberated women from womanhood and has reduced the value of human life to price.
If you would like to know more about our culture of crime - the shakedown from street to state-level, see here:
“Progress” has not won any of the wars it has started. This includes the ones in our culture, as well as those undertaken to defend its voodoo values abroad. Vandalism is redefined as victory, of course - but that does not make it so.
It is hard to notice this failure as the war is still underway. The one at home is undeclared, but it is going as well as Afghanistan or Ukraine.
This war is fought with words. Nothing is as it seems, as the grand strategy is to simply make belief replace reality.
The whole crazy show is the enemy of sense. Its weapon in the battlespace of your brain is jargon.
FITTING IN TO NOWHERELAND
Jargon is camouflage for people who want to blend in with a world that isn’t really there.
It is a sign of adjustment to a place that does not exist. Using the right verbal voodoo signals you are one of the in-crowd. When used, it is obviously not right, but right-thinking people rely on the exclusion of the obvious to stay in charge.
This is the function of jargon. It excludes the real, codes common sense as ignorance, and is the word armour of the weak. Enfeebled by fantasy, our friends in the unreality-based community defend themselves by this form of attack.
A SONG TO BELONG
Jargon permits the user to sound like they belong. Not in the practical, real world, where words match things and the obvious is true.
It makes the user sound like the people they are trained to admire. Scientists, responsible centrist leaders, twinset mic-dropping girlbosses, and men who like John Stoltenberg proudly refuse to be men.
This is how the milquetoasts win. They make the actual unsayable, whilst promoting policies so destructive, insane and diabolical that to describe them in words of one syllable would be to declare yourself gaga.
Our institutions are now occupied by spellbound babblers. This has consequences in practice which cannot be talked away.
How has this happened?
Jargon is the passport to professionalism. The professional world is now the make-belief world where titles signal entitlement. A professional used to be someone who could do without being told. Now there is a handbook. Repetition is key, and the rote learning of the latest magic words.
The argument from authority - the justification of legitimate power - rests on expertise.
This used to mean being better at something than others. It now means being better at parroting postmodern word salads.
This was exposed by Sokal and Bricmont in their “Intellectual Impostures”, in a happier time when the habit of makework by makewords was confined to the makeup of universities.
Now it is everywhere.
As Jonathan Meades pointed out in 2018, jargon is used by people who know they are guilty - and don’t care.
“Jargon is the language of the culpable, who will always sidestep admission of guilt.
It is the language of bad faith, of people without conscience, who, if they ever suffered shame, have long forgotten what it felt like.”
Jargon locates the user in a field of equally empty signals. This field of words and feelings is not real outside the community of motivational speakers, whose audience is themselves. It is antagonistic.
Jargon serves to exclude as well as include. Its purpose in division is to insulate the wicked and incompetent from fair assessment, and to preserve their nonsense behind a cordon sanitaire of coded noise. It is a message of contempt for the common and their sense.
What matters to our machinery of state is loyalty, not ability.
In our system the absence of moral and intellectual integrity is an advantage.
If you have no principles beyond your daily download of mainstream memes you will crave the reward of the loyalty programme. Card carrying membership has its benefits.
If you do not think very well, or at all, loyalty furnishes you with all the glamour of the capable classes but with none of the burdensome baggage.
You can sound and look clever whilst being neither. You don’t even have to believe what you are saying, though it helps if you look like you do. Jargon is weaponised insincerity, deliberately frustrating efforts to gainsay it. Why is this the case?
It is a means of preserving a power that cannot survive an honest argument. Basic descriptions of reality are earnestly described as “hate speech” for this reason.
The Jargon Enjoyer hates meaningful speech.
MUSIC TO WHOSE EARS?
Oscar Wilde stressed The Importance of Being Earnest, saying
“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces”.
He also wanted to dress as a cello. Wilde was quite the instrument.
Being earnest can be a tremendous help to those afflicted by the surface tension of jargon. To be told one thing is another with a straight face is to encourage your head to explode.
I think this is intentional. Yet as any good bomb-wallah knows, it is always better that the robot gets the blast.
SURVIVING THE MINDFIELD
Jargon functions as affirmation to the self and a warning to others. It is a minefield of deliberate mistakes. Only those who prize it will devote their time to keeping up with the latest traductions (distortions)
If you do not, the mine explodes and you are out of the game. Jargon is a tripwire, a claymore for the competent.
It is a front presented to the enemy promising the threat of detonation. The enemy is anyone who knows jargon is bullshit, but cannot say so for fear of losing their job.
These anti personnel mines demoralise the troops. There’s no defence if you set one off. Others learn to avoid them by the example of those who didn’t.
This produces a climate of fear. How much of your job is spent in this sort of threat detection and avoidance?
THE CONSOLATION OF CONTEMPT
Jargon is not just chatter for empty boxes. It is a means of control, and in practice it excludes practical wisdom with the forced inclusion of psychobabble.
Midwits hate their betters, and despise their “inferiors”. Jargon enjoyers are usually people who have no practical skills, cannot fix their homes or cars, and would be begging for an apple in the event of a large solar flare. Or worse.
They resent the fact that more intelligent people exist, and that they cannot do anything useful. They also resent facts generally, and rule them out by rote. This is the routine of resentment, the pitiable chagrin of the enemies of reality. Jargon is a litany of spite, for those who see in the world a contradiction of themselves.
It is a contrarian’s dictionary and that it is mean is what it says. A miserly spirit of envy animates its speech, which is a list of the reasons of the irrational.
Jargon is codified vengeance on the best by the worst. It defends the indefensible with the incomprehensible, making the senseless sensible.
HOW THE TURNTABLES
If (when) you are oppressed in person with robobollocks, ask for clarification.
The framing is that you are the idiot here anyway. We all have our roles to play. Play it well.
If jargon is deployed it is done so to designate you as ignorant, and incapable of challenging the naked imperium. An explanation is not out of order. Request one.
This kills the jargon enjoyer. They will seethe, and then spout more jargon.
Politely and firmly insist on the meaning of the phrase.
This cannot be done. Jargon is a means of ruling out plain speech, because what is disguised by it is plainly ridiculous. Just tell them you don’t understand, and ask them what they mean in the simplest possible terms.
If you politely persist in asking for an explanation you cannot be disciplined and can watch calmly as your commissar of cobblers fails to defuse the bomb they set for you. Be patient. Smile.
Jargon is a weapon. It is the IED in the dusty road to ruin. A counter insurgency mentality is needed here, to survive this liberal intervention.
Keep calm, and carry on asking the robots to self destruct.
Nice piece.
There is a sub-species of jargon called “scientism” which is the most lethal.
It can render almost anyone speechless and defenseless in 10 syllables or fewer.
A friend who worked on Harry Potter movies explained the spell gag - a Greek or Latin prefix, and a mismatched language suffix.
Pure magic.
Consider the obvious phrase “sad sissy” (my bullied childhood up to the massive testosterone bath which hit at age 11)
dysphoria -> dysferonia -> unhappy
Puerile -> paedile -> childish
Paedile dysferonia -> VERY SERIOUS childhood unhappiness woo woo
Gender-based paedile dysferonia -> call an ambulance!
10 syllables for “sad sissy”
You can play the game all night.
The opposite is “National Geographic Title” game which involves phrases like “The Amazing Potato”, or “The Sea” or even “Fireflies”
Excellent insight