Word: jargoning
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...Line-item veto. "That's something they [the Democrats] want." Small-business regulatory reform. "That's bipartisan. That will pass, probably 90 to 6." And on and on down the list: health-care insurance, term limits, campaign-finance reform and a balanced budget. Pure Dole, so comfortable with legislative jargon, so uncomfortable with campaign rhetoric: "When we leave here for the convention, if we've got a pretty good list of things we've passed, the President can veto them but we can make our case." You want vision? Bob Dole has found his vision: a legislative to do list...
Applied to mere sullen neurotics who attack others by withholding themselves, passive aggression is an item of banal psychological jargon. But down at its universal level, the term describes an unseen and mischievous jujitsu of history. It suggests the potent emotional antimatter that begins to glow like a dark crystal when people become disconnected from, and learn to mistrust or hate, the powers that control them (government, political process, corporation, parent, spouse...
...heard about "spam"--Internet jargon for machine-generated junk mail--and over the years I'd received my share of E-mail chain letters, get-rich-quick pitches and cheesy magazine ads. But I had never experienced anything like this: a parade of mail that just got bigger and bigger, like Mickey's brooms in Fantasia. Not only was I getting hundreds of subscription notices, but I was also receiving copies of every piece of mail posted to those lists. By Monday the E-mail was pouring in at the rate of four a minute, 240 an hour...
...numerical ability could understand all of the mathematics in existence. With time, the amount of information exploded, and people began encountering less and less of all the information in the world. We have become so specialized that each scientist has his or her own vocabulary, and a politician's jargon is different from a lawyer's. Now the game of chess has also been placed beyond one person's reach...
...Your instructors will see everything you write. Everybody is familiar with the sanitized, official jargon used by the nice people who publish the CUE Guide. If 90 percent of the students in a course complain that a professor didn't understand his material, this will be reported as "a significant percentage of students had some difficulty following the lectures," "Professor Quigley's last original thought came in the 1950's" becomes "while students applaud Professor Quigley's mastery of the history of his field, they long for the inclusion of more contemporary perspectives." And so on. But though the world...