Jargon Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.

  Jonathan Swift

  Law, Special, Peculiar

  "Gulliver's Travels". Book by Jonathan Swift. Part IV: "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms". Chapter 5, 1726.

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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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• 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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• 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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• Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

  Mason Cooley

  Language

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• The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

  Murray Rothbard

  Revolutionary, Theory, Fallacy

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• Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard.

  Mason Cooley

  Beard, Robes

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• While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

  Thomas Jefferson

  Plato, Philosophy, Science

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Late President of the United States”, p.248

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• Never use jargon words like 'reconceptualize', 'demassification', 'attitudinally', 'judgmentally'. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

  David Ogilvy

  Use, Ass, Pretentious

  David Ogilvy (2012). “The Unpublished David Ogilvy”, p.54, Profile Books

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• People seem to get caught up in jargon like they get caught up in ashrams and power structures and they never become free. They become masters of jargon and power structures.

  Frederick Lenz

  People, Structure, Masters

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• [Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.

  Paul Lockhart

  Teacher, Math, Nomenclature

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• Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

  Alan Greenspan

  Government, Support, Political

  "Greenspan’s Testimony: Will the ‘Maestro’ Face the Music?" by Richard (RJ) Eskow, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 5, 2010.

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• I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Desire, Way

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business.

  Corinne Maier

  Business, Modern, Communist

  Corinne Maier (2007). “Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay”, p.13, Vintage

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• Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Air, Giving

  David Hume (1854). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume: Including All the Essays, and Exhibiting the More Important Alterations and Corrections in the Successive Editions Pub. by the Author”, p.9

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• Sometimes when you're listening to a neuroscientist, they have a tendency to use a particular type of jargon that works in their world perfectly but that would lose the average layman.

  Pharrell Williams

  Average, Listening, Use

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Philosophy, People

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• It's been great, I have to dig deep for really raw emotions and at the same time I have to use my intellect to say the ridiculous medical jargon while acting and treating a patient and then I have to try to have a personality and emotions as well. So it is definitely hard work.

  John Leguizamo

  Hard Work, Personality, Trying

  "Ice Age 2 - John Leguizamo (Sid) interview". Interview with Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'

  Diane Ackerman

  Chocolate, Lasts, Months

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of the Senses”, p.144, Vintage

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• Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry?

  Constance Hale

  Writing, Technology, Hype

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• When it comes to scientific matters the ready talkers simply run riot. There are a lot of pseudo-scientists who with a little technical jargon to spatter through their talk are always getting in the limelight... The less they know the surer they are about it.

  Charles Proteus Steinmetz

  Running, Littles, Matter

  "ELECTRICITY WILL KEEP THE WORLD FROM FREEZING UP; Noted Expert, Dr. C.P. Steinmetz, Talks of the Future Wonders of Scientific Discovery and Ridicules Many Prophecies". The New York Times Interview, www.nytimes.com. November 12, 1911.

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• To cover the fact that a central bank is merely a cartel which has been legalized, its proponents had to lay down a thick smoke screen of technical jargon focusing always on how it would supposedly benefit commerce, the public, and the nation... there was not the slightest glimmer that underneath it all, was a master plan which was designed from top to bottom to serve private interests at the expense of the public... the system is merely a cartel with a government facade.

  G. Edward Griffin

  Government, Benefits, Facts

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• Angus Deaton has written a wonderful book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. . . . Deaton's book is a magisterial overview of health, income, and wealth from the industrial revolution to the present, taking in countries poor and rich. Not just jargon-free but equation-free, the book is written with a beautifully lucid style. . . . [P]owerfully argued and convincing.

  Michael Marmot

  Country, Book, Style

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