On Jargon

Suppose you're a healer or wizard in feudal times. You've discovered this magical potion called “aspirin,” made from the bark of the white willow tree. People flock to you, paying you thousands of gold ducats to use your miracle cure. Then like a moron, you decide to make your recipe for “aspirin” public. You have no secret anymore. Poof. The market disappears in puff of dragon smoke – everyone's out grabbing their own white willow trees. Everyone suddenly has the ability to stop fever and pain and you, my dear wizard, are out of a job. While everyone is healthy and headache free, you have paid for your candor with your livelihood.

Witness this hard water softener named Calgon. For those without Flash, the commercial went like this: When asked how he got his shirts so clean and white, this hoary Chinese launderer replied “Ancient Chinese Secret.” His assimilated wife, after calling her husband “some hotshot,” spills the beans. Loudly and within earshot of western roundeye customer, she tasks her husband with buying more Calgon. The justifiably angry colonialist whitebread occidental customer growls at the wizard of white: “Ancient Chinese Secret, huh?” The launderer goes out of business and has to run back to running opium dens, but that's a chapter for another commercial. You see, rather than communicate the recipe for white shirt, this caricature preferred to use jargon.

Jargon is the equivalent of misdirection or legerdemain - language used to confuse by dazzling. By confusing your clients, competitors and employers with magic and hoodoo and voodoo, you think you're making yourself indispensible, but instead you're breaching trust. The IT department tells you: "Oh, your hard drive needs to be defragmented because it's got bad sectors and trouble in the partitioning with--” Oh, just shut up and take my money, techie - until you discover he's full of crap and you get rid of the swindler. Jargon is only a temporary solution, at best.

Writing teachers use jargon too. But it's as flimsy and needless as magic. “Don't split an infinitive!” they'll tell you, lest your mother break her back or something. “For GOD's sake, stay away from that superlative before you modify it!” as if you remember what an infinitive or superlative is. As if you care. By confusing you with rules of grammar, by making you diagram and partition and conjugate and decline, they have dazzled you with a kind of illusion – that writing is hard, and that you should leave it to the professionals.

But writing isn't that hard. Don't let the practitioners of writing-jargon scare you away from writing.