Word: jargoning
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...style is a blend of Gaelic eloquence, Harvard donnishness and American stump evangelism. In front of a microphone or over a dinner table, he can draw on a broad mental library of recondite words, literary and historical allusions and outlandish bits of jargon to taunt, flatter or flay adversaries. He has stormed the rostrum to denounce the General Assembly as "a theater of the absurd" and to dismiss reports on American imperialism as "rubbish." When something clear and pleasing emerges from U.N. newspeak, he quotes James Joyce to describe the rare phenomenon: "Its whatness leaps to us from the vestment...
Physicians have long used medical jargon to impress gullible laymen. As far back as the 13th century, the medieval physician Arnold of Villanova urged colleagues to seek refuge behind impressive-sounding language when they could not explain a patient's ailment. "Say that he has an obstruction of the liver," Arnold wrote, "and particularly use the word obstruction because [patients] do not understand what it means." Such deceptions may still occasionally be practiced on patients, but this does not account for the impenetrable prose in contemporary medical journals, which are read mostly by doctors...
...strides purposefully into the operating room each day," he says, "but to read his papers, you wonder how he finds the courage to get out of bed in the morning." Crichton has a theory about the use of obfuscating medical language. In explaining it, however, he unwittingly demonstrates that jargon is highly contagious: "Medical obscurity may now serve an infra-group recognition function, rather like a secret fraternal handshake. In any event it is a game, and everybody plays it. Indeed, I suspect one refuses to play at one's professional peril...
Schafft reports that many parents are not aware of the separation of blacks and whites in Greentrees. Thus while white parents hope for integration, the school experiences of their children point out what Schafft, in academic but accurate jargon, calls "the imperfect mesh between ideology and behavior...
Strangers Devour the Land is full of such natural poetry. By contrast, the numbers and statistics of economists and engineers and the jargon of sociologists and bureaucrats add up to a stultifying litany. Boyce Richardson, a New Zealand journalist, skillfully blends both sides in his documentary about the cri sis of a culture. The cumulative effect of his book is like being overtaken by a glacier. Even when describing the rich life in a Cree hunting camp, where he produced an award-winning film, Richardson cannot really mask his sense of fatalism. He accepts the fact that the Indians must...