Jargon Quotes

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

Greece will not manage to get back on its feet without restructuring its debt. There is no way around it. The country's creditors will have to reduce a portion of its debts by extending maturity dates, lowering interest rates or giving them what's called a 'haircut' in financial jargon. ~ Peer Steinbruck

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

Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be seperate. Do not be a social animal. ~ Lewis Thomas

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon. ~ David Ogilvy

I have the strong impression that scientific communication is being seriously hindered by poor quality abstracts written in jargon- ridden mumbo jumbo. ~ Sheila M. McNab

Art that samples other art, quotes that quote other quotes--your writer knows this phenomenon, in jargon 'he's aware', he was raised in a culture of (not more ironic jargon, select only the most appropriate gustatory analogy): regurgitation, a culture of glutting to vomit and glutting again on the vomit until reemesis--chunky cheese mimesis--then licking that puddle again. ~ Joshua Cohen

There was in Italy a hidden demand for a boring government which would try to tell the truth in non-political jargon. ~ Mario Monti

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. ~ Michael Crichton

Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches - allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it's like to do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it. ~ David Graeber

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love "the lost". You can't feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as "all lost people".
Don't wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. ~ John Piper

I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me."
"Well, sure she would! You're her own kind, right?"
"I am her kind?"
Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, "I mean you're in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?" he asked. "No normal person could understand you people."
"What exactly do you find difficult to understand?" Dr. Battista asked him.
"Oh, you know, all that science jargon; I can't offhand - "
"I am researching autoimmune disorders," Dr. Battista said. "It's true that 'autoimmune' has four syllables, but perhaps if I broke the word down for you… ~ Anne Tyler

Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk. ~ Brian Sewell

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

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

Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles. ~ Henry David Thoreau

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long words where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

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

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything out-right barbarous. These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article. ~ George Orwell

To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. ~ Steven Pinker

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business. ~ Corinne Maier

Jargon live in the swamps. They feed on attention. If they can't get that, they'll settle for fear and confusion. ... A little Jargon doesn't look like much. Some people even keep them as pets. But they form packs, and they are very dangerous. ~ Carlos Bueno

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason ~ Thomas Paine

Jargon marks the place where thinking has been. It becomes a kind of macro, to use a computer term: a way of storing a complicated sequence of thinking operations under a unique name. ~ Marjorie Garber

Fruit fly scientists, God bless 'em, are the big exceptions. Morgan's team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like 'speck,' 'beaded,' 'rudimentary,' 'white,' and 'abnormal.' And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The 'turnip' gene makes flies stupid. 'Tudor' leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. 'Cleopatra' can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, 'asp.' 'Cheap date' leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the "POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic" gene in mice - 'pokemon' - nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the 'pokemon' gene (now known, sigh, as 'zbtb7') contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn't want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors. ~ Sam Kean

Dave Stark has taken the best of recent marketplace management concepts and married them to timeless biblical principles of leadership, translating business jargon into ministry language. The combination is an encouraging and practical guide to Christ-centered ministry leadership. This book will be helpful to anyone involved in leading a church or serious about modeling servant leadership. ~ Jonathan Reckford

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science. ~ Murray Rothbard

Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

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

Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession. ~ Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military manners. Now, as earlier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.
Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large. ~ Patrick O'Brian

The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved. ~ Carl Schmitt

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that. ~ Gautam Adani

For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague - force, mass, motion, and even time - and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton's laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists' view of nature.

It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.

And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere. ~ James Gleick

I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all these years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left. ~ Daisy Johnson

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. ~ George Orwell

The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought. ~ Andre Maurois

I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning. ~ Marianne Dashwood ~ Jane Austen

Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on learning, who brought about its rebirth among us. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard. ~ Mason Cooley

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner. ~ Ezra Pound

It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade. ~ Josephine Tey

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. ~ David Foster Wallace

One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it. ~ Alec Wilkinson

Kippenger suppressed a grin
I could've sworn he did. Without looking at anyone, he said, "Jargon wrote, 'You'll get nothing from me, ever, you dog-breath, rotted corpse of a king.'"
Vargas flowered at me. In return, I smiled and looked around the room, rather proud of myself for that. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Very often, people talk about mothers, and they think that mother has to lose her sexuality. Mother has to be plain. Mothers cannot be exciting. Mother should not be up on what's going on; she shouldn't know the jargon of the day. And I just find that so old-fashioned! ~ Sheryl Lee Ralph

For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about him ~ Oswald Chambers

IT'S EASY to poke fun at nonsensical office speak. For one thing, it sounds exhausting: a colleague might "reach out," "drill down," and promise to "circle back" in a single e-mail. But by signaling membership in a white-collar tribe, meaningless jargon can be quite powerful. ~ Anonymous

Breeze raised his dueling cane, pointing it at Ham. "I see my period of intellectual respite has come to an end."
Ham smiled. "I thought up a couple of beastly questions while I was gone, and I've been saving them just for you, Breeze."
"I'm dying of anticipation," Breeze said. He turned his cane toward Lestibournes. "Spook, drink."
Spook rushed over and fetched Breeze a cup of wine.
"He's such a fine lad," Breeze noted, accepting the drink. "I barely even have to nudge him Allomantically. If only the rest of you ruffians were so accommodating."
Spook frowned "Niceing the not on the playing without."
"I have no idea what you just said, child," Breeze said. "So I'm simply going to pretend it was coherent, then move on."
Kelsier rolled his eyes. "Losing the stress on the nip," he said. "Notting without the needing of care."
"Riding the rile of the rids to the right," Spook said with a nod.
"What are you two babbling about?" Breeze said testily.
"Wasing the was of brightness," Spook said. "Nip the having of wishing of this."
"Ever wasing the doing of this," Kelsier agreed.
Breeze turned to Dockson with exasperation. "I believe our companions have finally lost their minds, dear friend."
Dockson shrugged. Then, with a perfectly straight face, he said, "Wasing not of wasing is."
Breeze sat, dumbfounded, and the room burst into laughter. Breeze rolled his eyes indignantly, shaking his head and muttering about the ~ Brandon Sanderson

authoritarian institutions, such as governments and churches, do not use language but jargon, repetitive phrases that are not supposed to have meaning but merely enforce obedience. Language has its own internalizing ethic; it is individualistic and thus threatening to any monolithic system that demands a chorus or litany. ~ Norman F. Cantor

A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds. ~ Jonathan Swift

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

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles. ~ Mark Twain

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

We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology. ~ Kevin DeYoung

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another. ~ John Maynard Smith

Dear Bea - I've been wading through a pile of "Due before 3" mimeos - but now at last I know what to do with them: into the wastebasket! I'm also hep to the jargon. I know that "illustrative material" means magazine covers, "enriched curriculum" means teaching "who and whom," and that "All evaluation of students should be predicated upon initial goals and grade level expectations" means if a kid shows up, pass him. Right? ~ Bel Kaufman

I laughed when she said "utilize" and she said "what?" and I said "just utilize, it's a meaningless word" and then she tried to tell me that it "communicated" something different from the word "use" and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like "oh, how sweet, it tried to talk," made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of "yeah, it communicates something, it's a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn't have any books in the house, and you're self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don't actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word 'use' for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you're the one with the big mental dick, even though 'utilize' is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows. ~ Halle Butler

Sometimes the hardest part I think for actors on '24' is some of the jargon and getting the ideas and the thoughts and the information out quickly enough and succinctly enough and clearly enough. ~ Cherry Jones

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo's outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon. ~ Robert Byron

When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the "Is Earth f**ked" question, he set the jargon aside and replied, "More or less."4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as "resistance" - movements of "people or groups of people" who "adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture." According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes "environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups." Such mass uprisings of people - along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement - represent the likeliest source of "friction" to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. ~ Naomi Klein

We can't really do any improv on 'The Big Bang' because we don't understand a lot of what the dialogue means to begin with, because of the physics jargon. ~ Johnny Galecki

In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for "the snap", that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history. ~ Ralph Abraham

What a transfiguration it is to love! And the little shrieks, the pursuits in the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, the jargon that is melody, the adoration that breaks through in the way a syllable is said, those cherries snatched form one pair of lips by another - It all catches fire and turns into celestial glories. ~ Victor Hugo

You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage. ~ Martin H. Fischer

People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language. ~ Barry Ritholtz

Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless. ~ John Stott

The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us. ~ Thomas Jefferson

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised. ~ Anthony Daniels

But there are still many who continue to marvel at the wisdom of God in so planning the universe that big rivers run by great towns, and that death comes at the end of life instead of in the middle of it. Divest pleas ... of their semi-philosophic jargon, reduce his illustrations to homely similes, and he is marvelling at the wisdom of God who so planned things that the two extremities of a piece of wood should come at the ends instead of in the middle. ~ Chapman Cohen

Two more [birds added to her cage]. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!? - - - Miss Flite to Esther. [I thought a the last two a bit strange until I looked and saw the old definitions of gammon (as being double talk or obfuscation) and spinach (as being a spurious and unwanted growth). How appropriately summarized the situation! ~ Charles Dickens

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

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

Left-wing ideas are predicated on Marx's materialist understanding. Whether or not an individual who espouses Left-wing ideas considers himself a Marxist - and few have since the fall of the Soviet Union - Left-wing ideas are predicated on Marx's materialist understanding of life. In popular jargon, 'materialism' means an excessive love of material things. But philosophically, 'materialism' means that only matter is real; there is no reality beyond the material world. ~ Dennis Prager

A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle - to which he was hopelessly addicted. ~ Anthony Bourdain

DON'T BE FOOLED BY ADVERTISING JARGON: The terms "all-natural" "fresh," and "no additives" carry little weight. Since these terms are loosely regulated by the FDA, they are tossed around like dollar bills in a strip club. ~ Rory Freedman Freedman

Words like meditation, karma, samskaras, they're just words. You can get into the jargon, you can speak it, but that doesn't mean you'll be any freer. ~ Frederick Lenz

The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Well, Page, I do wish the Devil had old Cooke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life ... But the old-fellows say we must read to gain knowledge; and gain knowledge to make us happy and be admired. Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No ... ~ Thomas Jefferson

Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as st7-uctunal racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage" metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 ~ Michelle Alexander

There was a long pause. "you know," he went on, "I sometimes think mankind is dangerously arrogant. We do a few sums, and then claim we have the universe off pat. we measure the spaces between the stars, and declare them empty. We set a limit on infinity. We are like the occupants of a closed room; having worked out everything within the range of our knowledge, we announce that the room and its contents are all that exists. Nothing beyond. Nothing unseen or unknown, incalculable or neffable. This is it. And then every so often God lifts the veil - twitches the curtain - and gives us a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something more. As if He wishes to show us how narrow is our vision, how meaningless the boundaries we have set for ourselves. I felt that when Fern was talking. Just for a minute I though: This is truth, there's a world beyond all the jargon of unbelief. ~ Jan Siegel

Multiculturalism (and, we would contend, social justice) has too often been transformed into a code word in contemporary political jargon that has been grossly invoked in order to divert attention from the racism and social injustice in this country and the ways differences are demonized (McLaren, 1995). ~ Lisa M. Landreman

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

He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter. ~ Morris L. West

Listening, not jargon, is the path into the heart of music. And if we listen at a deep enough level, we enter into the magic of the song - no degrees or formal credentials required.
[...] [C]areful listening can demystify virtually all of the intricacies and marvels of jazz. [...] [T]he people who first gave us jazz did so without much formal study - and, in some instances, with none at all. But they knew how to listen. ~ Ted Gioia

The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense. ~ Kate Atkinson

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The navy is like a socialist country. Efficiency isn't part of the jargon. ~ James W. Blinn

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The world of the 90s and beyond will belong to managers or those who make the numbers dance, as we used to say, or those who are conversant with all the business jargon we used to sound smart. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders
people who not only have an enormous amount of energy but who can energize those whom they lead. ~ John Welch

This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue. ~ Frank I. Cobb

[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more. ~ Frans De Waal

Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity. ~ William Hazlitt

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

To me the gospel is not a great mass of theological jargon. It is a simple and beautiful and logical thing, with one quiet truth following another in orderly sequence. I do not fret over the mysteries. I do not worry whether the heavenly gates swing or slide. I am only concerned that they open. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. ~ Eric Bentley