Word: jargoneers
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Military briefings are meant to be not only as dramatic as possible but redolent with knowing jargon. One of the more ingenious examples of the craft takes place on a windswept crag overlooking the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. For the benefit of important visitors, a demonstration of enemy tactics is staged by G.I.s. Playing the part of North Koreans, they slip up to some barbed wire surrounded by mock-up mines. One G.I. snips the wire with a captured enemy wire cutter, thus demonstrating how North Koreans make sneak attacks on U.S. and South Korean patrols. During the show...
After Christmas, education stopped at Nanterre, Chaos regned. The fete had begun once more. Informal and having no real ruling clique, the movement at Nanterre, later to be named. The Movement of March 22, accepted all kinds of students. Jokes and songs replaced much of the usual political jargon. Much more spontancity and personal involvement was possible at Nanterre than at the Sorbonne where "revolutionary vanguards" controlled all action and inaction. And for the first time in the history of the French student movement members of more than one groupescule militated in the same organization. Secure that the interests...
...Jargon, the sublanguage peculiar to any trade, contributes to euphemism when its terms seep into general use. The stock market, for example, rarely "falls" in the words of Wall Street analysts. Instead it is discovered to be "easing" or found to have made a "technical correction" or "adjustment." As one financial writer notes: "It never seems to 'technically adjust' upward." The student New Left, which shares a taste for six-syllable words with Government bureaucracy, has concocted a collection of substitute terms for use in politics. To "liberate," in the context of campus uproars, means to capture...
Barred from that fashion of minds, he went on people retreat wholly into themselves or into a makeshift substitute like the frenetic sensuality of the plastic hippie or the cool of the hip intellectual. The hippie's stripped down jargon- "I dig her;" "it's a groove;" "I'm up right" -thwarts emotional expression by stylizing it, he said. "Did you ever try ending a relationship by saving 'I've got to split the scene?" The mocking wit of the hip intellectual may be worse, he said, for it skirts around honest feelings without admitting their existence. "You find...
...easy to say that English is an ageless language ever renewed by fresh words and concepts. But lately it has been polluted by creeping neologisms and solecisms, many of them spawned by military jargon, television clichés and youthcult dialects. Should lexicographers rubber-stamp the linguistic junk or rear back and proclaim standards...