From: jchokey@leland.Stanford.EDU (James Alexander Chokey)
Subject: Re: jargon
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 92 08:21:29 GMT

In article <l6me2nINNhlv@mizar.usc.edu> adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:
>In article <76189@ut-emx.uucp>, kbrooks@ut-emx.uucp 
>(kevin brooks) proves himself incapable of making sense 
>of what he reads.  Perhaps a synopsis of the action 
>to date is in order. 

	Hmm.  Starting off with an ad hominum attack.  A good way to convince
people of the intellectual rigor of the upcoming arguments. (Subtitle provided 
for the sarcastically-impaired: Imagine a big "NOT!!!" after the last 
sentence.)

>Christopher Rywalt, maladjusted cartoonist, commented that
>> kbrooks@ut-emx.uucp (kevin brooks) actually uses:
>> > "problematization"
>> > "popularization"
>> >
>> >  This is exactly the kind of language I've been bitching about.
>
>James Alexander Chokey jumped in with:
>> These don't strike me as being at all jargony.  "Popularization" is
>> a very common word.  What do you find so objectionable with them?
>
>Chokey seemed to assume that a word either is or is not 
>jargon, so I asked the obvious question:
>

	Chokey (i.e. me) was responding to Christopher's whole article, the
remainder of which you left out.  _Immediately_ after the passage that you
did quote, Christopher went on to complain about how academics so frequently
make up "new words," rather than use existing ones.  The fact that he showed
surprise that someone would use these words (remember the "(kevin brooks) 
actually uses..." line," seemed to indicate that he thought these words were 
not legitimate or recognized English words. I was merely pointing out that
these were, in fact, recognized and perfectly legitimate words.
	The remainder of my article, which you also did not bother to quote,
was, furthermore, a defense of the "invention" of new words--  an assertion
that English contains a treasure trove of suffixes and prefixes that allow
us to create new words, the meanings of which should be perfectly apparent.
One does not, after all, need to think too hard in order to figure out
what words like "popularization" and "problematiziation" mean in order to
figure them out, even if one has never seen them before.


>> ...  But isn't it possible for
>> a word to be jargony in some contexts but not others?

	Sure.  One poster--  perhaps it was you?--  gave the wonderful example
of the use of the word "gaze" in Lacanian psychoanalyis.  I wouldn't dream of
coming up with such an outlandish assertion-- that "jargon" constitutes some
sort of absolute category-- and I don't really know what made you think I did.
Perhaps I didn't make it perfectly clear from moment one of my article that
I was responding to Christopher's complaint about the invention of words that
continually went on in academic discourse, rather that the idea of jargon
itself.  I suspect that, since the greater portion of my article (the 90% of 
that you omitted) was devoted to a discussion of the legitimacy of the two 
words in question and of the invention of new words, I may have been a bit 
sloppy and not explicitly spelled at the very beginning of the document that I
was responding to Christopher's complaints about academics inventing words,
rather than addressing the question of "what constitutes jargon."  I apologize
for having thought that this would be self-evident--  I was wrong.  (I still
think, however, that it would be pretty difficult to read the article as a
whole (as opposed to picking out one or two sentences from it), and not 
realize just what it was that I was addressing.

>
>Then it struck me that Chokey might not know what the 
>word "jargon" means, so I quoted the OED's definition:
>
>> [defintion deleted]

	How thoughtful of you, Arne, but have no fear--  I am well aware that
"jargon" is a perjorative term. As a historian who advocates clear and precise
writing and disdains obscurantist prose, I frequently deride the "jargon" that
seems so omni-present in contemprary scholarship. 
	Once again, I apologize if I did not make it clear in the very
first sentence of my post that I was not really talking about definitions of
"jargon."  But, I still can't help but think that you would have recognized 
this if you had read it and responded to it in its entirity.


>"Jargon" is a pejorative (read: subjective) term used to 
>_characterize_ an objective reality.  "Problematization" 
>is a fairly uncommon word except among some litcrit types, 
>but they overuse it with a vengeance.  If one is contemptuous 
>of the the discourse shared by these litcritters, then it 
>follows that one might wish to characterize their shared
>language as jargon.  And that's precisely what I did:
>

	Sorry to burst your bubble, but "problematization" is used among 
academics from a whole host of fields--  not just "a few lit-crit types."  
(Nice try, though.)  You're certainly entitled to call it jargon if you 
so desire.  If I were making a list of overused jargony words and phrases, 
however, I think "problematization" and "popularization" would be a lot lower
on the list than things like "discursivity," "always already overdetermined," 
"construction," and "slippage".
	Of course, all of this is really beside the point, since neither
Christopher nor I were not talking about what one is/is not "entitled" to call
"jargon."


> [dispute with Kevin Brooks' post deleted]
>
>
>Oh dear.  I'll repeat: I wanted to point out that Mr. Chokey 
>failed to take into account that words mean different things 
>in different contexts, and that "jargon" is a *contemptuous* 
>term used to characterize the language peculiar to a specific 
>group.  What I wrote is quite clear, I think.  What was it you 
>were looking for that caused you to misread me?
>

	Ah, finally a polite mode of address--  I'm no longer referred to by
just my last name  (BTW, "Jim" is what I prefer.). 
	I find it wonderfully ironic that you feel Kevin has misread your 
post, because I feel that your assertions here are based, almost entirely,
on a misreading of my and Christopher's posts.  While the few lines that you 
excerpted could arguably be used to suggest that I was making some sort of 
strange assertion of the existence of "absolute jargon" or something, that was
not really an issue in either my post or in the to which I was responding.
Maybe the deconstructionists really do have something with the idea that
"Every reading is a misreading!"


	--  Jim C. <jchokey@leland.stanford.edu>


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