Jargon Quotes

• Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.

  Kingman Brewster, Jr.

  Hallmark, Profession

  Address to the British Institute of Management, December 13, 1977.

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• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  George Orwell

  Thinking, Everyday, Phrases

  George Orwell (1958). “Selected writings”

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• Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

  David Lehman

  Hands, Your Side, Ideas

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

  John M. Smith

  Thinking, Talking

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• Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Sound, Said

  Theodor Adorno (2013). “The Jargon of Authenticity”, p.6, Routledge

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• Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.

  Richard Rosen

  Understanding, Frozen, Lexicon

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• Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

  David Ogilvy

  Business, Trying, Idiot

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• Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.

  Wendy Kaminer

  Brain, Left, Seems

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• Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Aim, Brevity, Avoiding

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• I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

  Jean Rostand

  Lying, Book, Reality

  Jean Rostand (1962). “The substance of man”

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• Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

  Theodor Adorno

  Thinking, Doe, Tasks

  Theodor W. Adorno (2003). “Adorno”, p.6, Psychology Press

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• You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Children, Writing, Years

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.94, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

  Eric Bentley

  Communication, Ideas, Age

  New Republic 29 Dec. 1952

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• Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

  Ezra Pound

  Pregnancy, Eye, Squares

  "Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts".

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• I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

  Anne Stevenson

  Art, Science, Hygiene

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• Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

  Irving Babbitt

  Style, Excellence, Substance

  Irving Babbitt (2005). “On Literature, Cultures, and Religion”, p.108, Transaction Publishers

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• Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.

  Pierre Hadot

  Art, Philosophy, Ancient

  "La Philosophie comme manière de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson" by Pierre Hadot, Jeannie Carlier, Arnold I. Davidson, Paris: Albin Michel, translated by Michael Chase, (p. 272), 2001.

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• What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

  Theodor Adorno

  Determined, Individual, Force

  Theodor W. Adorno (2003). “Adorno”, p.5, Psychology Press

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• Never let me hear that foolish word again.

  Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

  Foolish, Let Me, Impossibility

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• I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  Roger Ebert

  Wise, Long Ago, Editors

  Roger Ebert (2009). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2010”, p.583, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• Clutter is the disease of American writing.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Disease, Frills

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Self, Female

  Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

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• Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

  Harold Rosenberg

  Struggle, Self, Numbers

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• In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand advertising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Moving, America, Progress

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Disease, Unnecessary

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.6, Harper Collins

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