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Some call it gobbledygook. Others refer to it as gibberish, drivel, claptrap, or mumbo jumbo. Almost a century ago, in his lecture seriesOn the Art of Writing (reprinted by Dover in 2006), Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch called it "sham prose"--or jargon.
"Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst," the British author said to his students at Cambridge University in 1913. "It is becoming the language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being."
And this pompous and hollow language is still the enemy of good clear prose. The two main vices of jargon, said Quiller-Couch, are "that it usescircumlocution rather than short straight speech" and "that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nounsrather than concrete ones."
Fortunately, in lecture five of what he called his "course in First Aid to writing," Quiller-Couch offered a few "rough rules" for combating jargon.
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/advicefromthepros/a/QuillerJargon.htm
And this pompous and hollow language is still the enemy of good clear prose. The two main vices of jargon, said Quiller-Couch, are "that it usescircumlocution rather than short straight speech" and "that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nounsrather than concrete ones."
Fortunately, in lecture five of what he called his "course in First Aid to writing," Quiller-Couch offered a few "rough rules" for combating jargon.
- Worst Offenders
The first is:--Whenever in your reading you come across one of these words, case, instance, character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree--whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another of them--pull yourself up and take thought. . . . We may not be capable of much; but we can all write better than that, if we take a little trouble. - Woolly Words
Next, having trained yourself to keep a look-out for these worst offenders (and you will be surprised to find how quickly you get into the way of it), proceed to push your suspicions out among the whole cloudy host of abstract terms. "How excellent a thing is sleep," sighed Sancho Panza; "it wraps a man round like a cloak"--an excellent example, by the way, of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that "among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable." How vile a thing--shall we say?--is the abstract noun! It wraps a man’s thoughts round like cotton wool. . . . - Elegant Variation
Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:--Haywords and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however, took some time in settling to work. . . .Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into "that great but unequal poet" and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes "the gloomy master of Newstead": overleaf he is reincarnated into "the meteoric darling of society": and so proceeds through successive avatars—"this arch-rebel,’ ‘the author of Childe Harold," "the apostle of scorn," "the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot," "the martyr of Missolonghi," "the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart." Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse. In literature as in life he makes himself felt who not only calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and re-double. . . . - Dodges of Jargon
For another rule--just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train your suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon "as regards," "with regard to," "in respect of," "in connection with," "according as to whether," and the like. They are all dodges of Jargon, circumlocutions for evading this or that simple statement: and I say that it is not enough to avoid them nine times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred. You should never use them. That is positive enough, I hope? . . . - "To Be . . . or the Contrary?"
But let us close our florilegium and attempt to illustrate Jargon by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet’s soliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this fashion:—To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.That is Jargon: and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms. . . . The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, "They gave him a silver teapot," you write as a man. When you write "He was made the recipient of a silver teapot," you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun.
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/advicefromthepros/a/QuillerJargon.htm