Jargon Quotes

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.

It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.

And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“When corporate executives get really excited, they leverage their learnings against comprehension to revolutionize English.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia

“The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer

“There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.”
― Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

“His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
― Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

“Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.
Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission

“These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

“Freud and Jung and all the rest of them published their theories, but all they did was t'invent a lot of jargon t'get people talkin'. Gave mental phenomena a little scholastic color.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“DON’T BE FOOLED BY ADVERTISING JARGON: The terms “all-natural” “fresh,” and “no additives” carry little weight. Since these terms are loosely regulated by the FDA, they are tossed around like dollar bills in a strip club.”
― Rory Freedman Freedman

“Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I used to be scared of death until I found out it's now called 'end of life.' Phew, that was close!”
― Stewart Stafford

“In the forbidden zone of interpretation, the tyranny of language becomes the poisoned-tip of the bureaucratic spear.”
― Stewart Stafford

“One of the main functions of jargon is to exaggerate expertise.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“This finding or inventing of words for incomprehensible things has nothing to do with understanding. On the contrary, if we could get rid of half of our words perhaps we should have a better chance of a certain understanding.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution

“I am convinced that every appearance of terms like 'metaethics,' 'deontology,' 'noncognitivism, 'anti-realism,' 'emotivism,' and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”
― Sam Harris

“We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts."
"Really?"
"We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources.
"And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London: Detective Stories #2

“You don't fly to another country and expect the residents to speak your language. You have to communicate with speech they understand. Winning business involves speaking human, not spewing jargon.”
― Steve Woodruff, Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.

“One day I hope business will stop using military terms to describe how to serve a customer.”
― Richie Norton

“The goal of American English speakers appears to be to rob the mother tongue of direct meaning and replace it with needlessly-complex jargon.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Why do scientists never debate philosophers? It’s because they know they would be destroyed in argument, when they have to actually clarify their ridiculous and embarrassing belief system. Mandarins, in their little priesthoods, hide behind jargon so that they know that no outsiders can laugh at their lack of clarity. They create an in-language so that only the insiders can know how absurd the belief system is, and they all have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction. That’s how the Mandarin system works. They don’t dare to be clear because then it would be clear that they are the emperor in his new clothes and know nothing at all.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Karena corong pengeras suara bisa menjadi angin yang memutar masa lalu. Yang mengumandangkan kebusukan atau apa saja yang ia mau. Tidak peduli apakah kebenaran sungguh turun dari langit atau telanjur jatuh ke comberan. Sebab, orang sudah terbiasa mendengar tapi nyata nyata pandir menafsir. Betapa susahnya mengendalikan ego sendiri dan betapa mudahnya menyalahkan atau menjadikan orang lain kambing hitam. Apa saja bisa direkayasa jadi jargon yang menjatuhkan hukuman atau bahkan khotbah yang menghasut kekejian yang luar biasa. Kita tak pernah sungguh-sungguh jadi diri sendiri selain mungkin jadi artefak kesombongan. Topeng topeng kemunafikan telah jadi diorama pilu sepanjang sejarah. Kita dipaksa melawan waktu, yang alih alih mengajar orang untuk menjadi jujur, adil dan bijak. Faktanya, jejak kehidupan telah menjadi monumen angkara murka yang di susun menggunakan kekuatan palu dan gergaji besi.”
― Titon Rahmawan

“There is a tendency among people within a profession to use or create words whose meanings are clear only to others within their narrow group and obscure to the rest of the world. This tendency in all specializations is a barrier to communication and a support of self-serving secrecy in an “in” group. Writers have an obligation to defend their language against the assaults of jargon.”
― Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

“What’s a LAN?” Viona asked.

Darryl scoffed.

Patiently, Owen explained to the novice, “It’s a gaming meet thing. Competitors link up on a ‘local area network’ together.”

“So there’s no lag,” Darryl chimed in.

Viona felt too silly to ask what a LAG was.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exposed

“No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax.
My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.
I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’.
—Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home: A Memoir