Stuart Buck has a good post on literary jargon:
Modern scholarship on literature is often criticized for its seeming preoccupation with trendy postmodernist jargon. I used to find such criticisms appealing. But lately I've started to be more ambivalent. Lots of fields have their own jargon that is impenetrable to outsiders. If I write in an academic paper that "The TELRIC cost model for UNE prices should no longer be based on a scorched-earth assumption," hardly anyone would understand it, except for people who know something about telecommunications cost models, and they would find it perfectly clear. . .So maybe the jargon in literary scholarship is perfectly clear to people who read that sort of thing all the time. Or maybe it's not -- maybe all the jargon really is meant to be obfuscatory, or to gloss over the lack of any real substance. I don't know. The mere fact that the scholarship is difficult for outsiders to understand doesn't tell me all that much about whether there is something there worth understanding.
The other common complaint is that the terms they use could just as easily be explained in general english words. Well, sure, and I could write out "the time rate of change of displacement of a body", but it's simpler to say "velocity". Laymen don't really understand what that means, but most layman aren't interested in reading physics papers--or papers on the emergence of the novel in 18th century Europe. These are professionals writing for other professionals, and they're not going to type out "the necessary reduction of characters or events to simplified constructs dominated by a few major characteristics for the purpose of satire" when "satiric reduction" communicates that thought succinctly and clearly.
Should there be a professional class devoted to writing obscure volumes, legible only to other members of the class, on the subject of English literature? Is this activity sufficiently worthwhile to support with our tax and tuition dollars? That, my friends, is a question for another day. But just like professors who spend their lives grappling with abstruse physics or math problems that have little practical application, as long as they are performing this activity of questionable social value, they are going to use the language that communicates most clearly to others grappling with similarly tough issues, not to the laymen who complain that they can't understand a word.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 2, 2004 12:44 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksWhat is needed are those with feet in both worlds who can write for the popular audience. Science has had many of these writers. Economics has had a few (even though many here don't like him, Krugman is very good at this).
There are a few good sources for popular treatments of difficult philosophical and literature related ideas. One of them are those little comic books that I see at Barnes and Noble devoted to things like postmodernism... Unlike Asimov for science, Krugman for economics, and one guy I read for math (Ivan I think his name was)...I'm not really aware of any one person who is a good popular writer for academic literary theory.
The complaints I hear have less to do with the existence of jargonized prose, and more to do with the assertion that in English Lit in particular (and humanities in general), the jargon is too often used to hide poor scholarship and the lack of original ideas. Which is generally not such a problem in abstract math and physics.
Jane --
Are you saying that you're in favor of college-lit-profs using in-group jargon? Or just that it's inevitable?
Hmm. I think I understand why the clotted writing of the English-lit profs annoys so many. First because it's just plain annoying. But second because: aren't English profs supposed to be professional connoisseurs, promoters and protectors of good writing? It'd be nice if engineering profs wrote better too, but at least they don't have the same stand-up-for-quality-writin' mandate.
I also question whether it's really inevitable that English profs will use thickets of jargon, at least thickets as overgrown as they often come up with in American academic writing. British lit-academic writing, so far as I've been able to tell, is much more likely to be accessible to nonspecialists, even when relatively specialized topics are being discussed.
By the way, am I alone in thinking that the idea of English profs needing a hyper-specialized, impossible-to-penetrate language to discuss what they're on about is pretty hilarious? And that the idea of conflating literary criticism and philosophy is also worth a chuckle or two?
i think engineering, math and physics get off the hook because they're discussing very complicated ideas. english literature touches on things that all of us are supposed to be acquainted with, especially the large number of people who took dating degrees (i.e. liberal arts).
so when a liberal arts grad complains about impenetrable text, there really is a problem, just as when an engineer complains bout someone's unclear thoughts (or bad math). hell, if an engineer is complaining about your writing, you're really in trouble!)
People in fields that are *really* complicated ofte try to use terminology that makes them simpler. For example, "cookie" instead of "persistent distributed state vector." And Albert Einstein famously said that you can explain *anything,* in some intellectually honest way, to a 14-year-old. The problem with the literary types is that all their instincts seem to be in the other direction...that of obfuscation.
In engineering and the physical sciences (at least), jargon terms are very precisely defined. Is the same true of literary jargon?
I for one would dispute that jargon in math or physics is necessarily well-defined. Many an undergrad has gone insane trying to figure out what exactly is "trivial," are what exactly is the "symmetry" in question.
I think the larger dispute is about poor writing, which often manifests as the excessive and pompous use of jargon.
The term "trivial" simply means "this would be easy to prove if you were as bright as I am" (and here I'm only being half facetious), and isn't actually a technical term used in mathematics, while "symmetry" usually refers to "group symmetry", about as well-defined a concept as you're ever likely to come across. I think you'll have to look to some other field than mathematics if you're searching for fuzzy concepts; precision is the very lifeblood of the subject.
"People in fields that are *really* complicated ofte try to use terminology that makes them simpler. For example, 'cookie' instead of 'persistent distributed state vector.'"
There are two definitions of jargon at play here: "pretentious, convoluted speech or writing" and "specialized technical language." Your use of "cookie" is jargon in the latter sense. I think that Jane is arguing that English professors are entitled to speak and write in specialized language, and I agree. It would be nice if they could do it without being convoluted and pretentious.
Bruce:
I have been editing my girlfriends PhD dissertation in English Discourse. The preliminary comments from her committe indicate the edited writing is clear, concise and immediately understandable but "not academic". One advisor quipped "It sounds like it was written by an engineer". At least that comment was factual.
I am indeed an engineer who has learned to write in a style that seems to communicate to most readers without committing too much violence to the written word. This it seems is an obvious flaw in much of what passes for academic discourse.
Bruce
...which brings me to one of my long-standing peeves. As an engineer, I've been told for decades to remember my intended audience. Artistes, on the other hand, seem to expect their audiences to exert all the effort.
GT
...which brings me to one of my long-standing peeves. As an engineer, I've been told for decades to remember my intended audience. Artistes, on the other hand, seem to expect their audiences to exert all the effort.
GT
C S Lewis once said: *It is assumed that if an audience fails to understand an artist, the fault must lay with the audience. I have never run across the great work in which this important doctrine is proved." (loose quote)
By the way, am I alone in thinking that the idea of English profs needing a hyper-specialized, impossible-to-penetrate language to discuss what they're on about is pretty hilarious?
No, Michael, you are not alone. These days it is difficult to distinguish university English from Freemasonry.
The real test for a specialized jargon is whether it is strictly necessary. In mathematics no person could possibly get by without learning the shorthand of mathematical symbols, various axioms, etc.; and it has been that way almost from the beginning. The finest English literary criticism, on the other hand, has for centuries been written in plain English. A break with this tradition, therefore, requires an explanation. Why now, after all these years, is a specialized jargon necessary?
It isn't, of course; and not all English professors have been corrupted. Paul Fussell's "The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism" is pure literary criticism intended for a small professional audience -- and yet it is written in standard non-jargonized English.
I could produce other examples, but I won't bore you. The point is: if some English professors do not require a specialized jargon, why do others? What are the jargonized professors saying that can't be said equally well by the plain-English professors?
It all comes down to writing for your audience. If engineers and English professionals are writing for their peers, then "inside" jargon is appropriate. If the piece is written for the uninitiated,(the poor schmucks)then it should be written in plain English.
Too many people, being impressed with their own credentials, use inside jargon in pieces written for public consumption as a way of either showing their superiority to the masses, or disguising utter garbage.
I am not a professional anything, but when Jane writes on Economics, I can follow what she is saying because she writes for dummies like me.
I make my living writing software used to analyze relative motion in high speed video images, but I'm ABD in English and I think of myself as a poet. There are reasons for technical language in literary criticism—scansion, for instance—but the obscurity of postmodern literary theory does not result from the use of terms of art. Alan Sokal convincingly demonstrated that even its practitioners literally don't know what their peers are talking about.
Jargon is not in and of itself a bad thing. I am very much an advocate of easier communication when I know the person will understand.
In one of my classes last semester, I read a book on "Social Discourse" whose primary point, as far as I could tell, was that the way things are communicated often shapes how the content itself is interpreted.
Every point, if there can be said to have been any points, was something I already knew from common sense. It was 200 pages of jargon-filled nonsense cleverly disguising a shocking intellectual paucity.
As I say, I'm not defending the excesses of PoMo. Personally, I think the utility of exploring issues of race, class, and sex in the works of authors who have been dead for several hundred years is just about non-existant, and so I tend to dismiss that entire field of endeavor -- which pretty much sums up most of the PoMo movement, unfortunately -- as useless crap. And indeed, many of their books are devoted to belaboring obvious and trivial points -- "What you think about a work depends on your beliefs going into reading it" "Shakespeare was, by the standards of 20th century America, a sexist" and similar trivialities, dressed up with several hundred pages of prose.
On the other hand, may I point out that physics devotes a lot of time to analyzing trivial generalities we already knew -- "If you drop things, they fall" and so on. Sometimes it's worthwhile to analyze even obvious things more closely.
Other commenters have made two a priori assumptions I don't agree with:
1) English professors, unlike math professors, should be writing for a general audience
I don't see why they should be. Like math professors, the general audience is breathtakingly uninterested in what they do, and getting less so by the year as the field becomes more and more professionalized and specialized. The fact that many people like to read does not mean that they are the natural constituency of a professor's work, any more than the layman is the natural constituency of a math professor's work because almost everyone uses arithmetic and many people like to play chess.
2) Math and physics only use jargon because they need to, while English professors could write in plain English if they wanted
Math professors could, if they chose, write their work in plain English. It would just be interminably long, and exceedingly painful for an expert to read and understand. Ditto the English professor writing about an area rife with technicalities, whether that be poetry, drama, satire or so on. That doesn't excuse dressing up adolescent insights as scholarly works with jargon filled blather, but stretching a thin point into published work is hardly a sin confined to the field of English literature, in these "publish or perish" times.
I believe the fundamental question is: "Are you writing to impress, or to communicate and educate?" Too often, the intention is to impress and the jargon content is (and is intended to be) "awe inspiring". I believe most of us read professional material primarily to learn, not to be awed. I have told professor/contractors that any use of the expression "it is intuitively obvious to the casual observer that" was grounds for summary cancellation of their contracts. They have generally responded well.
There are engineers who can write well and who can speak well to audiences at a variety of levels. Most of them, early in their careers, worked for supervisors who insisted that they communicate clearly and precisely and worked with them to improve their skills.
I would argue that the current champions of arcane speech are attorneys, particularly patent attorneys. Read any recent public law, or any randomly selected section of the tax code, or any recent patent if you have any doubts about this assessment.
Jane writes: "Math professors could, if they chose, write their work in plain English. It would just be interminably long, and exceedingly painful for an expert to read and understand. Ditto the English professor writing about an area rife with technicalities, whether that be poetry, drama, satire or so on."
I guess we differ on this. It's probably true that explaining a difficult physics or math concept in plain English would be long and laborious -- I know zip about both subjects, but it seems plausible. But the list of unavoidable literary jargon terms is pretty small one, even in poetry. (A copy of The Readers Encyclopedia and a handbook explaining things like scansion and terza rima is all anyone needs.) And I've never run across a hard-to-understand English-prof-type prose passage that wouldn't have been shorter and clearer (instead of longer and more tedious) had it been put into plain English rather than prof-speak. I'm with Vlad on this: Hazlitt and T.S. Eliot wrote perfectly accessible prose, and if today's lit profs believe that they're thinking deeper and harder thoughts than Hazlitt and Eliot did, then they really do have some explaining to do.
Like Mike, I've got a reasonably fancy Eng-lit degree and have spent too much time hanging out in arty writing and publishing circles, for what little that's been worth. And even so, I've never once run across a literary idea or concept so advanced -- what on earth could such a thing be? -- that it couldn't be easily expressed in accessible (and concise) prose.
One of the awful achievements of the po-mo lit-academic crowd is making too many people accept the idea that art is a field like science or engineering -- complicated, technical, and beyond the reach of ordinary, untrained beings. It ain't, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with the pretence that it is -- it's not as though "unreliable narrator," "rhyme scheme," or "third-act climax" are terms that take years and years of grinding study to comprehend.
FWIW, my hunch is that part of what the clotted-prose profs are up to is trying to make their field look like something hard and objective; I also suspect that they're doing their best, for vanity reasons, to make themselves look like intellectual specialists in a difficult field.
They've also fallen in love with the idea of literary criticism as a branch of philosophy, and with the idea of themselves as thinkers operating out on the breakthrough fringes of comprehensibility. Fact is, doing litcrit (let alone "being an English professor") is nothing like doing philosophy -- and, let's face it, most lit profs are anything but proficient thinkers.
Jane writes: "Math professors could, if they chose, write their work in plain English. It would just be interminably long, and exceedingly painful for an expert to read and understand. Ditto the English professor writing about an area rife with technicalities, whether that be poetry, drama, satire or so on."
I guess we differ on this. It's probably true that explaining a difficult physics or math concept in plain English would be long and laborious -- I know zip about both subjects, but it seems plausible. But the list of unavoidable literary jargon terms is pretty small one, even in poetry. (A copy of The Readers Encyclopedia and a handbook explaining things like scansion and terza rima is all anyone needs.) And I've never run across a hard-to-understand English-prof-type prose passage that wouldn't have been shorter and clearer (instead of longer and more tedious) had it been put into plain English rather than prof-speak. I'm with Vlad on this: Hazlitt and T.S. Eliot wrote perfectly accessible prose, and if today's lit profs believe that they're thinking deeper and harder thoughts than Hazlitt and Eliot did, then they really do have some explaining to do.
Like Mike, I've got a reasonably fancy Eng-lit degree and have spent too much time hanging out in arty writing and publishing circles, for what little that's been worth. And even so, I've never once run across a literary idea or concept so advanced -- what on earth could such a thing be? -- that it couldn't be easily expressed in accessible (and concise) prose.
One of the awful achievements of the po-mo lit-academic crowd is making too many people accept the idea that art is a field like science or engineering -- complicated, technical, and beyond the reach of ordinary, untrained beings. It ain't, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with the pretence that it is -- it's not as though "unreliable narrator," "rhyme scheme," or "third-act climax" are terms that take years and years of grinding study to comprehend.
FWIW, my hunch is that part of what the clotted-prose profs are up to is trying to make their field look like something hard and objective; I also suspect that they're doing their best, for vanity reasons, to make themselves look like intellectual specialists in a difficult field.
They've also fallen in love with the idea of literary criticism as a branch of philosophy, and with the idea of themselves as thinkers operating out on the breakthrough fringes of comprehensibility. Fact is, doing litcrit (let alone "being an English professor") is nothing like doing philosophy -- and, let's face it, most lit profs are anything but proficient thinkers.
Gee a whole day has gone by & no one has Gee a whole day has gone by & no one has attacked lawyers yet!
Several points:
Every profession, guild, whatever uses jargon. I agree w/ Jane that
"as long as they [the pros] are performing this activity of questionable social value, they are going to use the language that communicates most clearly to others grappling with similarly tough issues, not to the laymen who complain that they can't understand a word."
And such jargon needen't consist of a long word (sesquipedalian) or a word which does not seem to have any familiar root.
For instance, both Baseball & the Army Engineers use the term "balk", a monosylabic word, in a completely different sense than the general public does (well, maybe not in BB, the pitcher hesitating to confuse the runner being guilty of a "balk")& I'm sure that the uninitiated are confused. But people w/o a HS diploma in those trades understand the term as soon as it is explained to them.
Legal terms like "per stirpes" & "per capita" save words & space & have centuries-old histories. Yet their use causes non lawyers to snigger & a legal document to fail various "readability" tests.
And, the use of legal jargon depends on the situation. For instance, a trial lawyer in a jury trial uses such jargon at his or her peril.
Unfortunately, with The Law, the audience must be able to understand the words used, especially in statutes, regulations, & judicial decisions.
And it doesn't help when judges decide to act as superlegislators & find a statute or regulation void for vagueness when such statute or regulation is clear, pellucidly clear, to anyone with a grammar school education. Or when they are clearly overruling a previous decision on the same issue while claiming that they are merely distinguishing the present case from the previous one. Or when they find penumbras upon emendations (or was it vice versa)in the words of the Constitution.
Finally, I must note that there's a real legal writing problem in repetition & length and that there are numerous guides for lawyers to help them on such things.
Oh, I forgot: sometimes a legal document is prepared with the intention of obfusciation. Cf. politics.
TomCom
I agree with much what TomCom says re: obfuscation, but I think many of the commenters points stands as far as using jargon as shorthand vs. using jargon as smoke. Use of Latin is something I, as a scientist try very hard to avoid, even if it is something everyone understands. i.e. and e.g. are the worst offenders, because they have perfectly good Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Law seems like a field where Latin lives in many instances for historical reasons (weak reason) or to impress non-lawyers (strong reason). Hell, medicine can probably take some of this flak (anterior, interior, posterior? you mean outer and inner and behind?). "In-situ" is a phrase I use frequently, because there is no good shorthand for it (and even in-situ needs to be precisely defined the first time for the field/experimental tack one is taking). If someone points out something better, then I'll use that.
While crap writing certainly thrives in the hard sciences, my anecdotal evidence tells me that it clearer writing is generally strived for, because (1) your livelihood depends not on how many $50 words you know, but how well you can tell people with the money why what you do is important, leading to (2) why write peer-reviewed papers one way and funding proposals another? - writing sucks anyway, so, do it once and cut and paste. Maybe in the English profession, your livelihood depends more on your super English kung-fu. Not surprising.
I can't wait until artificial intelligence transcribes our thoughts into a variety of readable languages.
Good use of jargon speeds up the transmission of ideas and when it is used for that effect, I accept it's use, but as you point it, writing in terms that aren't meant for the layman make specialized communication even more so. After all, you don't read raw TCP/IP packets or html code, you let your web browswer and computer handle those functions, passing through translation something much more meaninful to you, the reader.
I've run into medical research I've wanted to understand more fully without the time or cost of involving a doctor in helping me understand that research. Until useful layman translation A.I. comes out to help me understand that research, I'm going to have to rely on my own investigative research, uncovering terms and meaning or hire someone to do it for me.
Dilly
It's been my experience that the use of Latin or Norman words or phrases does not impress legal clients, or even my lay friends. In fact, it turns 'em off.
So such words or phrases are used by lawyers in dealing with clients, sophisticated or unsophisticated, only when such words or phrases are generally recognizable to laymen (& the profession, esp., the courts)& save words.
But, to expand on my point in my previous post about trial lawyers addressing a jury, generally, no lawyer should use such phrases in speaking to clients, even in a formal setting.
I don't use, in your example, "i.e." or "e.g." in speech. But, I do use those terms (latinisms if you want) on the 'net in all kinds of communication, 'cause they are easier to type than "that is" or "for example".
More important, I wouldn't ask a client if he wished to leave his property to his kids/grandkids "per stirpes" or "per capita", because I couldn't be sure that he knew the precise legal meaning of such terms. In other words, not only would I be showing off, I might be doing him a disservice. But in drafting his Will I might use those latinisms to express his intent re his kids/grandkids.
The other day when my periodontist (expensive word for a specialist who charges big bucks) was examining my gums, he noted certain things to his assistant who dutifully entered them into my file, such as "6mm, mesial (?) #6", but when he addressed me at the end, he said (in other words, he translated) "ya got a problem with the inside gum around your upper right 'eye tooth' ".
Unfortunately, he still charged big bucks.
TomCom
Alan Sokal convincingly demonstrated that even its practitioners literally don't know what their peers are talking about.
This is a point worth emphasizing. If anyone is unfamiliar with Alan Sokal, he wrote a parody of postmodernism and submitted it as a serious journal article, and it was accepted. It's in the spring 1996 issue of Social Text. I like his summary of the affair here. Sokal accuses postmodernists of "silliness," which he describes this way:
First of all, one has meaningless or absurd statements, name-dropping, and the display of false erudition. Secondly, one has sloppy thinking and poor philosophy, which come together notably (though not always) in the form of glib relativism.I don't think this debate is really about jargon. I think it's about whether postmodernist jargon really means anything. My impression, after a master's in French lit, is that it occasionally but rarely does.
I had the distinct honor of being the first journalist to call Alan Sokal when the Social Text spoof was revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca, and because I'm an ABD in mathematics I understood why what he did was hilarious. But the sad thing is that some time afterward I found a copy of that issue of Social Text, and I read the whole thing. Alan's deliberately nonsensical article is by no means the most peculiar, and all the other authors were SERIOUS.
I think it's pretty easy to argue that English professors could do with less jargon by asking a simple question:
Was there less jargon fifty years ago?
After all, the literature hasn't changed, only a bit has been added. If it takes more jargon today, well, it would seem that the jargon is affected.
As for engineers using jargon, I would say that good writing always keeps jargon to the minimum necessary. Opening a J2ee handbook here on my desk to a random page, I find the following prose:
So how does one obtain a handle to a DataSource? The answer lies in understanding the basic lookup features supported by the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). JNDI is a set of APIs that are part of the J2SE and J2EE used to provide a standard interface to naming and directory services. Naming services provide a mechanism for binding human-readable names to objects and resolving objects to names. Directory services are similar to naming services with the exception that more sophisticated object searching is provided. Basically, you can think of things like file systems that map file names to and from file objects as naming services.
Seems pretty clear to me... is it unreadable to english majors? All of the acronyms used are known to anyone who would be in the target audience. Except for a couple of words (interface, object), I don't see any jargon at all, even though the topic is pretty esoteric.
As an engineer in a government regulatory organization, my biggest complaint is the requirement --by the lawyers-- that we write everything out in words, when a simple graph or diagram or equation would express the concept clearly and succinctly. The problem is that the lawyers do not understand technical language (i.e., mathematics), cannot read drawings, and do not understand the significance of a curve on a graph.
f=ma (or e=mc^2) says it all...
...if you really want to see mangled English, just get your hands on a business document written by an engineer, most of whom like to use eighteen words where three will do, presumably because so many of them are used to being paid by the size of the job.
Engineers specialize in writing explicitly at all costs (and for good reason). Like any other specialist, you ask them to work in a field where they have no skill or practice at your peril.
As to academic lit jargon merely being impenetrable, I have to disagree. I have never found a (well-written) legal document that I couldn't understand, given some quality time with a good dictionary. Ditto for medicine, physics, number theory, biochemistry, and so forth. A lot of the academic liberal arts stuff is a whole other can of worms: translate it into plain English, elide the finer details, and it's still a swamp of half-formed ideas. It needn't be that way—I've read good theoretical work on literature. Heck, even Poe's rants against "modern" poetry are clear, and he dumps the full load of jargon and foreign languages on you.
But just like professors who spend their lives grappling with abstruse physics or math problems that have little practical application, as long as they are performing this activity of questionable social value, they are going to use the language that communicates most clearly to others grappling with similarly tough issues,...
A layman can turn himself into an educated amateur and put a physics paper to use. In fact, in fields like astronomy, it's routine for amateurs to publish papers that inform the professionals. Can you imagine a full professor of literature hunting down a teenager and begging him to write a paper, maybe with some help, and proudly sharing priority with the kid to help get his own name on an important paper?
Physics papers also generally filter out to general benefit. I can point to particular gadgets and say "this feature comes from this list of academic papers". The latest work is translated into plain English and published to an eager lay audience (Pop Sci, Discover, Sci Am, Nova, various pay TV shows). I see no reason the liberal arts should be different: laymen are clearly interested in them. Yet there seems to be much less cross-over to the general public than in the more abstract and highly-technical fields. I find this odd as literature, its techniques, and its history are inherently more accesible and interesting to the average person.
Unfortunately, science is not immune to being hoaxed. One of many examples is that of the brothers Bogdanov (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html).
I can see 3 reasons, 2 innocent, 1 not so innocent, why the liberal arts fields develop our own jargon even when we shouldn't:
1. Any group of people who hang out together a lot are going to develop their own slang as a matter of course. The more they hang out together the more developed this slang will be. There's no sane reason why SF fans when using "fanspeak" should have referred to themselves in the plural as "Phen" rather than as "fans" but occasionally we did. Nor is there any real reason why Anime fans (aka "Ottaku") should sprinkle bits of Japanese into our writing but we Ottaku do it all the same when communicating with one another. It's the moral equivalent of a secret handshake since nobody outside the hobby would care enough to pick it up. English profs who make up words like "deconstruction" and "Post modern" are probably in the same boat. I doubt that the fanspeak of the literary profs is any sillier than the fanspeak of the Rap phen. ^_~
(Vanilla Ice expounding symbolism and historical background in Jane Austin's novels? Hmmmm! @_@)
2. People who spend a lot of time with words wouldn't do it unless they like wordplay for the sake of wordplay. So it makes sense that such people would make up new words for the sake of it. For Tolkien it was the invention of several Elven languages. For someone else it was the invention of Esperanto. For one prof it was the invention of "satiric reduction" as a shorthand for expressing an idea over and over again. When phen have had a couple of centuries to develop a fanspeak we shouldn't be surprised if the effects are similar to what we should expect if the same literary analysis of Anthony Trollope were written in Klingonese. Read Snorri Sturlason's "Edda" all the way through sometime and you will have as clear an example of the sort as you could ever hope to obtain. ^_^;
3. This leads us to Tradition - "That which has been done is that which we shall always do!". No matter which major we're discussing the Liberal Arts field is essentially training in a profession (professional speechmaker or, as the Romans called it, "Rhetor") that has been obsolete for 1500 years but retained because it was also useful for the training of clerics. And from it's very beginning among the Sophists it was found useful for making "decayed gentry" (or what we would call "the downwardly mobile") more productive and content with their lot. With a background like that is it surprising that both the "secret handshake" effect and the "wordplay" effect were deliberately used to exclude the commoners? @_@
However, the shorthand aspect that Jane points out should not be neglected either. Saying "Rhetor" instead of "professional speechmaker" is both historically more accurate *and* more merciful on the typing fingers. In the days when Latin was still a universal language of scholarship it would also have actually been *less* obscure by virtue of the fact that a scholar who wrote in it would guarantee that anybody who cared would be able to read it no matter what language they normally spoke. So if a slang ever becomes universal enough to cross the language barriers I suppose it could be very useful to the profession or fandom that develops it.
In the end, I guess that a guideline that Larry Niven once laid down should be used: "If what you say doesn't matter then by all means be as clever as you want in saying it; Zen riddles, Norse kennings, obscure literary allusions, or anything else you please may safely be used. If what you say *does* matter then be as simple, direct, and brief as possible in your language no matter what. It is a sin to waste the reader's time."
- S.P.M.
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