Using Jargon - Introduction

Have you ever wondered why people use jargon?

From the weatherman’s warning of “oncoming precipitation” to the mechanic’s eternal excuse of “we’re waiting on parts”; from the football commentator’s description of a game of “two halves” to restaurant menus and art critics and religious people and teenagers and the list goes on. Everyone uses jargon.

But have you ever wondered why people use it? The simple answer, and one that I have long assumed, is that people use jargon to exclude others. But quite often the reason for verbal verbosity, dialectic indirectness, equivocal elocution, and archaic ambiguities (including the four ridiculous phrases I have just used) is much more complex.

What follows this week is several quotes that I have found from professions that, in my opinion, are the worst offenders (including of course those annoying people who are actually paid to use, abuse and effuse jargon in their day to day work – lawyers). Apart from simply posting the quotes, I am also going to give reasons other than exclusion for why in my opinion people use jargon (Please note, this may end up being a rant and a rave, but after all, this is a blog).