Alexander B. Lees
In Praise of Jargon
Mr. President, trustees, distinguished faculty, members of the class of 2003, and guests, I’m honored to be speaking here today.
I was given several important pieces of advice regarding writing a commencement address.
The one I heard frequently was, “make it short. For god’s sake make it short!” Hopefully I’ve got that one under control, but we’ll see after the next twenty-five minutes if I actually achieve that.
I was told not to be too cliché. That’s why I threw out my first draft which I called “How to change the world and make the most of your education by embracing failure, and never taking the easy route: a retrospective on our four years here.”
Someone also recommended not being too serious or boring, so I decided that calling my speech “On the first 3190 digits of Pi” was a bad idea, too.
Nor should I be offensive, they said, and so I had to nix “In defense of bigotry and anti-immigration: why Pat Buchanan should have won the primaries.”
But the most important piece of advice came from my dear friend Foster, who told me, and I quote: “Dude, if you get up there and quote a philosopher, I’m going to [expletive deleted] kill you.”
Those were my basic criteria: in a small amount of time, say something clever and unique. And quoting a philosopher would be the worst crime, for it would be unnecessarily verbose, boring, and, by definition, already said. And that is not to mention the fact that, and I think this may have been Foster’s worse fear, it would be pretentious and impossible to understand. I think he’s right. So I would never get up here and say, for example:
The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea — a notion whose object is the Idea as such, and for which the objective is Idea ... This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself — and here at least as a thinking or Logical Idea.
That’s an actual quote from Hegel, by the way. And we can see why I would never quote it in a commencement speech. What the hell does it mean? It’s simply way too jargony. Jargon: what the dictionary describes as the “inarticulate utterance of birds, twittering, gibberish.” But, I’d point out, it’s not just philosophers who twitter in this way. What if I had been a physics major making the same point? Foster would have said to me, “Dude, you better not get up there and start talking about some [expletive deleted] scientific theory.” And I would have said “Of course, I’d never get up here and say something like ... ”
Loop quantum cosmological methods can be extended to homogeneous models in a diagonalized form which leads to a simplification of the volume operator, most importantly the Hamiltonian constraint, such that its spectrum can be determined explicitly.
What? Or what if I had been an English major? I’d have to stay far away from quoting things like this:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read ... Limits of the diaphane. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane ... Alpha, alpha: nought, nought, one.
And we know why Foster would want to kill me for saying something like that. We strive for clarity, right? We want familiarity and comprehensibility. “Learn how to speak clearly,” I could get up here and say: “always know the meanings behind your words.” But that would have to be part of my clichéd first draft. That definitely has been said before, and I think we all know the value of speaking cogently and clearly. I am not here to denounce jargon. I come here to praise jargon, not to bury it.
All of these quotations can sound like nonsense to an outsider. Their jargon isolates, sometimes offends, and often displays pretense. And this alleged incomprehensibility, this pretension, this jargony gibberish is everywhere. It is in every field and discipline.
But it hardly sounds like the twittering of birds to me.
Why did Hegel, the philosopher I quoted, need so much specialized philosophical language? Why invent new terms or insert old ones in unfamiliar contexts? Hegel attempted to create an entirely new logical structure, to see if starting with a new language altogether would solve traditional philosophical problems. As for modern physics? Without words like “quantum cosmology,” “Hamiltonian constraint,” “diagonalization,” “bosons,” and “quarks,” how could we possibly describe the subatomic world we couldn’t see a century ago before those words came into existence? How could we understand the world in a way that was completely unthinkable in Newton’s time, one that completely undermines old conceptions of physical reality? And Joyce, the novelist I quoted? He specifically draws attention to jargony language (indeed, he’s quoting a philosopher in that passage, I might add) and he uses jargon to show how a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions can challenge and transform our understanding of literature, history, and the very acts of writing and interpretation.
We need new languages to express new ideas. New messages need new methods of encoding. The creation of new thoughts necessarily entails the creation of words or their novel uses. Those new terms and their uses may sound like nonsensical gibberish at first, but that is what it means to have an intellectual revolution: to have something to say that simply cannot be expressed adequately, concisely, or sometimes at all, in the idiom of the previous way of thinking.
And what about the other concern, that jargon can sound pompous? Language can sound pretentious if we take it too seriously. But what is more serious than demanding absolute clarity and transparency? Language can subvert pretension if we treat it playfully and creatively. We must use languages, new ones or old, to our own ends. That may mean the unusual combinations of traditional words, the invention of strange-sounding words, or the quotation of a philosopher in an unexpected way. That, after all, is an unusual combination of strange-sounding words, and so the best of both worlds.
Either way, Foster, I’m done. You can kick my ass now.
June 8, 2003