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.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  David Ogilvy

  Business, Trying, Idiot

  56 Copy quote

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

  John M. Smith

  Thinking, Talking

  8 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Wendy Kaminer

  Brain, Left, Seems

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Aim, Brevity, Avoiding

  8 Copy quote

• 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”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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".

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Audiences forget facts, but they remember stories. Once you get past the jargon, the corporate world is an endless source of fascinating stories.

  Ian P. Griffin

  Communication, Past, Facts

  47 Copy quote

• 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.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Never let me hear that foolish word again.

  Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

  Foolish, Let Me, Impossibility

  12 Copy quote

• In the old days, words like sin and Satan had a moral certitude. Today, they're replaced with self-help jargon, words like dysfunction and antisocial behavior, discouraging any responsibility for one's actions.

  Don Henley

  Responsibility, Self, Dysfunction

  12 Copy quote

• At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

  Bill Bryson

  Practice, America, Feelings

  11 Copy quote

• Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

  George Packer

  Self Confidence, Age, Journalism

  "Telling Stories About the Future of Journalism" by George Packer, www.newyorker.com. January 27, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

  Milan Kundera

  Cutting, Feet, Air

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

  Show source