Word: jargoning
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Perhaps some of the confusion stems from first exposure to literary jargon. A freshman in Humanities, analyzing carefully on a final, found that "Dante used Beatrice as a phallic symbol for divine love." When the exams were handed back, his section man asked him about it. "I thought phallic just meant sort of literary," he said...
...null century is a new age of discovery, this time of space, and the world's educated public is learning a new geography of orbits and gravitational fields, a new jargon of escape velocities and soft landings. Space is not the surface of a sphere as Columbus' ocean was. It is three-dimensional, its lands are in rapid motion, and its snuggest harbors are more dangerous than the earth's most hostile coast. Its ships are finned and flame-tailed, guided by gyroscopes and coded signals...
...their discoverers. These men are as much entitled to be so commemorated, he suggests, as pioneers in other spheres whose eponyms are undisputed-the Strait of Magellan, Mount Everest, Halley's comet. But his book is for fellow specialists, and he does not advocate that laymen learn the jargon of the clinical conference...
...trained more than 1,000 salesmen to preach investment, ordered booths set up at country fairs and in railroad stations to popularize stocks, insisted that ads and booklets be written by non-Wall Street people to get away from financial jargon. His nose for investment was spectacular: his five sons are millionaires today because of portfolios Magowan set up and managed for them...
Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...