Word: jargonizing
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...Taboo. Editor Leonard Zweig, 36, ransacks the scholarly journals and attends all the social-science conventions in a constant search for ideas that can be turned into Transaction articles. Since social scientists have a habit of talking in professional jargon and burying their leads somewhere in the middle of their stories, Zweig has to edit heavily. But there are few complaints. Wrote Raoul Naroll, professor of anthropology, sociology and political science at Northwestern University: "It is startling to see some of my thoughts coming back to me in plain English...
...film's message, buried under clouds of smoky jargon, ends with the distressing thought that nonviolence, man, will get you nowhere. Playing a born loser who digs the lesson too late, Davis at best displays his own brash will to win and fires suspicion that a coherent statement about inequality cannot be fitted comfortably into the format of a headline entertainer's syrupy one-man show...
...plane got shot down outside a city, a jet protective patrol would be put overhead and a helicopter brought in to rescue them within the hour. If, however, a pilot crashed his aircraft in an urban area, he was told that he could "speak saroya," Air Force jargon for goodbye. Going in on the fourth wave over Hanoi, the pilot of the downed F-105 Thunderchief did in fact speak saroya: hit by crippling fire, he bailed out. Later, he was identified by Hanoi as Captain Murphy Neal Jones, 28, from Louisiana, and described as wounded in the hand...
Most of the remaining space jargon, according to McNeill's analysis, is made up of "nominal compounds"-words strung together endlessly in what scientists consider a logical order to describe complex devices or systems. Controlling the attitude of a ship by ejecting gas through nozzles, for instance, is called "nozzle gas ejection ship attitude control." The longest nominal compound discovered by McNeill appeared in the Congressional Record, and sounded as if it had been translated literally from the German: "liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen rocket powered single stage to orbit reversible boost system...
More detailed study of space-age jargon would be beneficial, McNeill feels, and his report must be considered only preliminary. "But we can conclude," he says, "that the following statement is probably true: Space-speak is an engineering technology concept expression manuscript sentence grammar device...