Word: jargoning
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...disease: overcomplication. It damages the language less spectacularly but no less fatally than oversimplification. Its practitioners are commonly known as specialists. Instead of unjustified clarity they offer unjustified obscurity. Whether his discipline is biophysics or medieval Latin, the specialist jealously guards trade secrets by writing and speaking a private jargon that bears only marginal resemblances to English. Cult words encrust his sentences like barnacles, slowing progress, affecting the steering. And the awful truth is that everybody is a specialist at something...
...learned men. They wrote when English was young, vital and untutored. English in 1971 is an old, overworked language, freshened sporadically only by foreign borrowings or the flickering, vulgar piquancy of slang. All of us-from the admen with their jingles to the tin-eared scholars with their jargon-are victims as well as victimizers of the language we have inherited...
...being shunted into I Corps. The buildup obviously presaged trouble in the coastal cities of Hue and Danang. But MACV asserted that it also posed a "serious threat" to U.S. troop withdrawals and that a "preemptive offensive" was planned with "limited objectives." Few reporters in Saigon doubted that the jargon was a verbal screen for a direct ARVN assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...this Fall to hear complaints against the Administration and to channel these complaints to the proper administrators. In the words of its chairman, Roger Rosenblatt, Acting Master of Dunster House and one of the original members of the Committee of Fifteen, it is meant "to take the jargon out of communication." Mr. Rosenblatt has not yet indicated with what the committee plans to replace the jargon. At any rate, this jargonless Committee is also powerless. It is intended only as a clearing house and channeling agency...
There is the continuing suspense over course corrections and interrupted communications, the fascination with the jargon and the technology, above all the apprehension for the crew's safety. There is also a sense of wonder at three men eager to journey a quarter-million miles, not to be first or even second, but merely to carry on a great exploration. For many of the earthbound, there is also a certain feeling of envy. Edgar Mitchell mused about the deeper implications of the mission: "Man is a total being, and I refuse to say science should be divorced from religion...