Word: jargoning
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Some engineers eventually find that they have more in common with jargon-speaking secretaries than with their wives. Electrical Engineer Kenneth Ongemach, for example, met his second wife Grace when she was a secretary at the company where he worked two jobs ago. Now 32, Ongemach owns a stereo set so complicated that he objects when other people try to operate it. His garage shelters a 1966 Cadillac and 1968 Pontiac Firebird with a 400-h.p. engine that he souped up himself. When his cars or his job preoccupy him so much that Grace complains, he told TIME Miami Bureau...
...example, a four-year-old thinks his favorite toy is about to be snatched away by another child, he probably will tense his lips and scowl, thrust out his chin and then raise his hand, as if to strike the offender with an open palm. In the ethological jargon of the Birmingham investigators, the child is in a "defensive beating posture." The more forward he holds his hand, however, the more likely he is to deliver the blow. Recognizing this change to an "offensive beating posture," the other child may well decide to retreat, even though not a threatening word...
Preposterous as it now sounds, this arch-enemy of jargon and cant almost became an attorney. Perhaps he thought the law would satisfy those obscurantist tendencies which later found their gratification in an extensive collection of the least-known 18th century American writings. Until the spring of his senior year. 1949, he was set to be a lawyer; then he changed his mind, turned down a place at the Law School, and went off to study history at Columbia. Back at Harvard a year later, still desulting about, he fell under the spell of Perry Miller. For a decade that...
...much noise themselves could respond to the arranged sounds that humans know as music. Cross, who happens to prefer Mozart himself, has an explanation of why the rats agreed with his musical tastes. Schoenberg, the father of serial music, wrote works of extraordinarily complex harmonies and rhythms; in behaviorist jargon, his music is dense with "information bits." Mozart used the traditional chromatic scale and a regular, readily identifiable beat. To a novice listener, and perhaps to a rat as well, Schoenberg may sound too cacophonic. Mozart might appeal to rats by the power of repetition, says Cross, as they gained...
None of this theorizing is terribly original, but thanks to a shrewd talent for translating well-known psychological principles into jargon-free "childrenese," the Israeli-born Ginott has gained a national reputation as a kind of Dr. Spock of the emotions. First published in 1965, his Between Parent and Child has been translated into 13 languages and has sold an estimated 1.5 million copies. Ginott is now a resident expert on the Today show, writes a monthly column for McCall's and frequently lectures around the country. A new book, Between Parent and Teenager, repeats the principles in Ginott...