Jargon

Jargon is the specialized vocabulary of a profession, hobby, or community. Doctors, sailors, programmers and skaters each have terms that outsiders don't know or that mean something different inside the group. The word originally meant the twittering of birds in Middle English, later meaningless chatter, and only gradually took on its present sense.

Jargon exists because it's useful. A specialist field needs names for distinctions ordinary language doesn't draw. A single term can stand for a paragraph of explanation, so two experts can talk quickly and precisely. Within a group, a shared vocabulary reduces mental effort, since well-known terms are recognized rather than worked out.

It also marks membership. Knowing the right words, and using them correctly, signals that a speaker belongs, and misusing them reveals an outsider; see Shibboleth. That's part of how groups form an identity. Argot is the term for vocabulary meant partly to exclude, historically the slang of thieves and other groups with something to hide. Polari, used among gay men in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, let speakers talk openly without being understood by people who might report them.

The trouble comes when jargon is used on people who don't share it. Experts often can't remember what it was like not to know their own terms, and so don't notice when they're speaking past a listener. Campaigns for clear writing in government and law target exactly this; see Plain Language. Some jargon also hides meaning deliberately, as when corporate language talks about "rightsizing" instead of layoffs.

Speakers move between registers depending on audience, using shop talk with colleagues and plainer language with family. Terms leak out of their communities as well, and words like "bandwidth" or "pivot" move from engineering into general business speech, often losing precision along the way.

Computing has a well-documented example. The Jargon File began in 1975 as a shared glossary of hacker slang at Stanford's artificial intelligence lab and MIT, later published as The Hacker's Dictionary and then The New Hacker's Dictionary. It recorded terms such as "kludge," "cruft" and the placeholder names "foo" and "bar"; see Metasyntactic Variable. Later editions were criticized for drifting from describing the culture to prescribing it.

In software design, some methods deliberately cultivate jargon. Teams are encouraged to adopt the vocabulary used by the domain's experts and use it consistently in conversation and in code, so names mean the same thing everywhere; see Naming. The aim is to keep jargon's precision while making sure everyone involved shares it.