Jargon quotes:

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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession. -- Kingman Brewster, Jr.
I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books. -- Jean Rostand
Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon. -- David Ogilvy
Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet. -- Wendy Kaminer
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
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
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
Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard. -- Mason Cooley
Jargon: any technical language we do not understand. -- Mason Cooley
Jargon is making it increasingly hard to understand what a public figure is actually trying to say -- Don Watson
Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. -- William Zinsser
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
Never let me hear that foolish word again. -- Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau
I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another. -- John M. Smith
Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon. -- Kevin Mitnick
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems. -- George Packer
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another. -- Erin McKean
You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage. -- Martin H. Fischer
There was in Italy a hidden demand for a boring government which would try to tell the truth in non-political jargon. -- Mario Monti
Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past. -- Kip Thorne
Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis. -- George MacDonald Fraser
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon. -- William Zinsser
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
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
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
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake. -- Nancy Pearcey
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
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
There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon. -- Stephen Jay Gould
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. -- Zadie Smith
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
Do not be taken in by 'insiderisms.' Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as 'lede.' Where they lede, do not follow. -- William Safire
Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose. -- Nina Bawden
It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'. -- Matt Ridley
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
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
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
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
It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious. -- Gretchen Rubin
I know this is economic jargon, but essentially, if you bring more women to the job market, you create value, it makes economic sense, and growth is improved. There are countries where it's almost a no-brainer: Korea, Japan, soon to be China, certainly Germany, Italy. Why? Because they have an aging population. -- Christine Lagarde
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
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
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
New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is. -- Theo James
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
Industry jargon may not be a language your customer understands. -- Ron Kaufman
Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business. -- Corinne Maier
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language. -- Theodor Adorno
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean. -- Theodor Adorno
Never use jargon words like 'reconceptualize', 'demassification', 'attitudinally', 'judgmentally'. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. -- David Ogilvy
The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. -- Michael Crichton
Many (Christians) have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment. In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless. -- John Stott
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems." -- George Packer
What's a' your jargon o' your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools; If honest nature made you fools. -- Robert Burns
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. -- George Orwell
We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology. -- Kevin DeYoung
Closed timelike curve is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past. -- Kip Thorne
I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years. -- Camille Paglia
In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?' -- Diane Ackerman
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
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
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies. -- V. S. Naipaul
[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
His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique. -- Richard Mitchell
I'm the know-nothing. I'm curious, I try to be entertaining, I try to translate the techno jargon, but in the end I'm the audience's representative. -- David Pogue
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
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
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
I would not be able to retain all the information, all the medical jargon these doctors do. I'm not really intelligent enough is what I'm saying. -- Justin Chambers
A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. -- R. D. Laing
I don't know that I could do a procedural legal drama and spend all my time in a courtroom talking legal jargon that I don't necessarily understand. -- Lucas Till
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
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
Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon -- Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
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 Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
I have found so many angels trapped inside undisputed jargon that I find myself digging at the words, in order to release them, from the books that unfairly captured their soul. -- Shannon L. Alder
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
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden. -- Susan Sontag
Hidden behind the facade of pompous jargon and noble affections, there is more sheer larceny per square foot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than any place else in the world. -- Richard Ney
Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favor of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth. -- Helena Rubinstein

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