Word: jargoning
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...your Feb. 8 picture captioned "Prizewinner Fraley Has Her Wish": when you inform the world that Mrs. Walter R. Fraley is ... running a "manually operated handcar," you commit mayhem and drag railroad jargon about by the ears. As boy and man I've functioned as a boomer on 86 pikes as brass pounder, shack, tallow pot, gandy dancer, hoghead* and so forth, from Alaska to Cape Horn; and because I've worked on the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad a short hitch, I am sure that a velocipede or "speeder" is not called a handcar on that streak...
...clause of the report. But Arthur Burns took the economic content as a professional matter of course; he expressed greater satisfaction in the report's style and readability. Says Burns: "I've always considered writing important. I went through all the stages that economists go through, from jargon to lucidity, and on the way I passed through the sesquipedalian* stage...
...giveaway on the slanted reporting of Mr. Bagdikian came with the story's conclusion. Facts Forum is spreading "fear [and] suspicion" ... It is also "divisive." This, of course, is the routine jargon of the left-liberals to describe anyone or any organization that fights Communism, collectivism or blind one-worldism...
...their to veryfey the statement." That sort of thing, says Barzun in the Atlantic Monthly, may be bad writing, but it is nevertheless harmless. The real danger to language "does not come from such trifles. It comes rather from the college-bred millions who . . . circulate the prevailing mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax that passes for prose." Barzun calls this "the infinite duplication of dufferism...
...trouble is that such expressions as "depression" and "recession" have become bad words, particularly among politicians, and are never to be used if a nicer word can be found. Thus, a whole new vocabulary has evolved. In the new jargon, a recession can be a "rolling readjustment," a "correction," a "slippage," an "easing," a "mild dip," a "downswing," a "normal adjustment," a "leveling off," a "slight downturn," a "lull," a "return to normalcy" or a "thingumajig." These euphemisms, of course, also defy definition. What, for instance, is a "return to normalcy," when for decades no one has known what economic...