Word: jargoning
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Primarily there was the philosophy of education trumpeted by the educator quoted above--"life-adjustment." Almost every high school in the nation requires its students to take at least two semesters of diluted kindergarten psychology usually called something like "senior problems." The textbooks, veiled in the blushing sociological jargon of the thirties, hint at sex and domestic problems long since resolved with a good deal more clarity in schoolyards and on lavatory walls. If the high school student hadn't conquered them by his senior year, he was already an irrevocable neurotic...
...significantly silent on last year's harvest and this year's crop prospects. He regretted "excessive wage increases" in 1956 but denied that that year had been one of "reckless advance." He admitted that a retrenchment had followed, but for those who weary of such economic jargon as saucering out of recession, Liu had a classic new Communist equivalent to offer: there had been, he said, a "U-shaped advance" in China's economy during the past two years. The first four months of 1958 had registered a significant "leap forward" in industrial and agricultural production...
Aside from its tendency to jargon, the trouble with verbal music criticism, says Keller, is that it tends to describe musical forms but fails to penetrate beyond them to the "fundamental unity" at the heart of a composition. To lay music's "inner architecture" bare, the critic must abandon language ("The age of description is over") and so immerse himself in analysis of a work that he "lives with it and dreams about...
Hallmark Hall of Fame: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is the kind of play that gives classics a bad name. The 350-year-old romantic comedy acts its age. Its plot conventions are no less archaic than its Elizabethan jargon, e.g., tillyvally, bawcock, clodpole. Such venerable comics as Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are no subtler or funnier than the names they bear. However fetchingly its poetry may glisten through the monkeyshines, it is a comedy of errors usually compounded in production. To handle this thorny flower at all on sponsored TV takes courage beyond the call...
This does not, of course, mean that everybody who clothes his findings in the bad-awful jargon-gibberish of the social scientists is contributing to the sum total of huamn knowledge by giving his insights form. He must also have something to say which is not intuitively obvious to his readers. The only possible excuse for this specialized vocabulary is that it embodies concepts which cannot be given the same precision in everyday vocabulary...