Word: jargoneers
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There did exist, not a "jargon" invented by scientists, but an alphabet for recording the Navajo language-a competent language, incidentally, with a large vocabulary. The alphabet, worked out by scientists, was minutely accurate in catching every sound and intonation, but contained so many odd characters, special marks and accents as to be utterly unusable for ordinary purposes. Dr. Harrington and I were asked to work out an alphabet in which Navajo could be written understandably, using only what is to be found on the keyboard of a standard typewriter...
...books but believing he can resell them to laggards at a slightly higher price for small but quick profit. Sir John, by offering only 3% (some British loans in World War I paid 5%), had left the disgusted stags too thin a margin on which to operate. In City jargon the Chancellor was "trying it on the hard way," but when two top-hatted, scarlet-coated minions of the Bank of England swung its portals wide his confidence was justified. In went the stockbrokers' clerks and within four hours the loan had been oversubscribed...
...livelihood depends largely on sheep raising. The Government found their lands 40% overgrazed, their soil rapidly becoming eroded, concluded that the Navajos must be persuaded to reduce their stocks. But how to tell them? The Navajos had no written language. The Government's experts had developed a scientific jargon which they called Navajo, but the Navajos couldn't understand it. In their own vernacular, the Navajos had no words for such paleface facts as "sheep units," "wholesale," "retail." Navajo translation of "candy": a word meaning "that which is striped...
Thereupon the Office of Indian Affairs created a new Navajo language. Its authors: Novelist-Ethnologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge and Smithsonian Institution's Dr. John P. Harrington. The new language used the English alphabet, created words which resembled the scientists' jargon and the Navajos' vernacular closely enough so that both sides could make head & tail of them. Last week posters drawn by Navajo artists and designed to teach Navajos the language by means of pictures and text (see cut) were displayed all over the reservation. Passed around in Navajo classrooms was the first Navajo primer...
...Josephus Daniels speaks his long piece honestly and guilelessly in the scrawny indigenous jargon of his trade in his time, and his naivete serves to reveal truths subtler than he suspects. A man who can pay tribute to his wife as "the best helpmeet with which man was ever blessed," who can affectionately reprint his own editorials and funny stories, who can, in the Southern journalist's equivalent of Arthur Kober, refer to a "floundered" submarine, speaks from the photographic heart of what his time and environment have made him, and is incapable of going wrong. Even such...