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Front Page: A place for jargon

Editorial Assistance
Things we’ve pondered


Ellipsis points


Many unhappy returns


Name that exponent


Limitless possibilities


Exponential shrinkage

The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual gives only one definition: “the special vocabulary and idioms of a particular class or occupational group.” Maybe misuse of special vocabularies has earned jargon its reputation as unintelligible, barbarous, or pretentious.

Jargon, like any other vocabulary, should aid communication. “Every field has its jargon, its specialized terms and phrases,” wrote John Holdren of the Core Knowledge Foundation in “What Are We Thinking? What Are We Saying?” “Lawyers have their writs, torts, and depositions. Doctors speak not of cuts or scrapes but lesions. Computer specialists banter about baud rates, RAM, and downloading.

“In the legal, medical, and other scientific fields, such jargon is usually employed for the sake of technical accuracy.” In such cases, jargon helps people communicate with each other. That is the place for jargon. Holdren, however, questioned the overuse of jargon by educators, especially in their communication with people outside their profession.

“Many parents say that they sometimes find the jargon of education mystifying and intimidating,” continued Holdren. “… I have to agree with them.

“Unlike scientific and legal jargon, [in] educational jargon … many of the words refer to no concrete thing or specific action. Some terms—such as ‘holistic’ or ‘process-based’ or ‘mastery learning’—have little more apparent substance than the dust that blows from erasers clapped together at the end of a school day.…

“Whenever we say or hear a term that only we as educators are likely to use … it should trip a little mental tape loop that asks, ‘Why am I using this word or term?’”

Is the jargon we use helping us communicate? Or is it sending a different message?

Jargon, said Holdren, can be “a kind of verbal secret handshake that says, ‘No outsiders allowed.’ This is especially worrisome when the outsiders are those whom we need to be our allies.” This applies not only to education. Most fields have some kind of outside constituency. Businesses have customers. Scientists depend on their funding sources and sometimes on public sentiment as well. Government is accountable to the voters. Sometimes there is a less direct constituency: for example, the military services depend on public support not only for their budgets but to enlist the public as members.

When writing for our own group, it is easy to assume that our jargon will be understood. With so much being published via the Internet, however, we should ask whether our jargon will be understood by outsiders—especially those who should be our allies.

This makes the advice of the Associated Press Stylebook appropriate: “In general, avoid jargon. When it is appropriate in a special context, include an explanation of any words likely to be unfamiliar to most readers.”

Above all, use jargon only to communicate. “If we use jargon to exclude, to obscure, or to mystify,” wrote Holdren, “then eliminating jargon from our speech is more than a matter of aesthetic fine-tuning: it is a moral imperative.”

Questions We’ve Been Asked

A. Ordinarily I would aim to delete the phrase because often the context suggests the opposite, indicating that the authors are not sure what will happen in the supposedly foreseeable future. However, astronomy is one subject in which the future really is, if not foreseeable, at least predictable with a high degree of accuracy.

Q. When is it wrong to say entitled?

A. The nice distinction is (or maybe used to be) that entitled refers to publications or rights and titled refers to nobility. However, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary says titled can be used for publications and nobility, and AP says not to use entitled for publications, only for rights (as in “entitled to a trial by jury”). So it could go any way except to use entitled for nobility.

Q. How do we use input as a verb (assuming that we should)? For instance, “These inferences are then input to the Human Computer Interface Manager knowledge-based algorithms …” Or should input be used as a noun, as in “These inferences are then used as input …”?

A. I don’t like the sound of input in reference to people’s comments or opinions. Still less do I like feedback, which reminds me of screeching microphones. In the case of computers, it may be hard to get away from using input, but in this case I think “the inferences are then added to the algorithms” would be correct. And wouldn’t “the Algorhythms” be a good name for a band?

Q. Is Internet always capped? Or only when it refers to the Internet (as opposed to “internet capabilities”)?

A. The Computer Currents Interactive dictionary says an internet is “a network of networks; a group of networks interconnected via routers. The Internet (with a capital I) is the world’s largest internet.” Technical Terms for Agribusiness Managers says: “The Internet (short for internetworking, the practice of linking technologically different and independently operated networks), is a network of networks which allows users to communicate using electronic mail, to retrieve data stored in databases, and to access distant computers.” Cap Internet if it refers to the Internet; “internet capabilities” probably refers to use of the Internet.

—Steve Dunham

Ellipsis Points

“Terminal punctuation is retained before points of ellipsis,” explains Words Into Type (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). If the omission comes after a sentence, include whatever ended the sentence: period, question mark, or exclamation point. Suppose we want to abridge Garrison Keillor’s fantasy that his family were really Italians, taken from Lake Wobegon Days:

We weren’t who we thought we were, we were the Keillorinis! Presto! Prestone! My father rushed to the closet and hauled out giant oil paintings of fat ladies, statues of saints, bottles of wine, and in rushed the relatives, hollering and carrying platters of spicy spaghetti, and my father would turn to me and say, “Eduardo! Eduardo, my son!” and throw his arms around me and plant big wet smackers on my cheeks.

We weren’t who we thought we were, we were the Keillorinis!… My father rushed to the closet and hauled out giant oil paintings of fat ladies, statues of saints, bottles of wine, and in rushed the relatives, hollering and carrying platters of spicy spaghetti …

Words Into Type notes that “ellipsis points are usually unnecessary at the beginning or end of a quotation,” explaining that it is ordinarily not necessary to emphasize the fact that a quotation has been excerpted from a larger whole.

Other punctuation (such as a semicolon) at the end of a quotation may be included if it aids clarity.

Finally, “An omission of whole paragraphs or stanzas of poetry, a change of subject, or the lapse of time may be indicated by a line of points or a line of asterisks.”

Stripping Out Carriage Returns

1. Search for two carriage returns in a row (in Microsoft Word, search for ^p^p),* which usually indicates the end of a paragraph (a return for the end of a line and a return for the end of the paragraph). Replace all these with a simple string such as QQQ that appears nowhere in the document. 2. Change every remaining carriage return into a space. Now there are no paragraph returns in the document. QQQ marks where the paragraphs should end, and the lines that ended with returns now end with spaces.

3. Replace all double spaces with single spaces.

4. Change QQQ to ^p throughout.

Name That Exponent

An amusing chart by Burks Oakley II and Sylvia Manning* shows a steeply ascending curve of “Exponential Growth,” with the vertical scale showing “Internet Hosts in Gazillions” and the horizontal progressing from “Dawn of Civilization” through “Bronze Age,” “Industrial Age Begins,” and “Last Week” to “Tomorrow Before Lunch.”

A June 1999 press release from the U.S. Census Bureau claimed “Exponential Growth in Number of Centenarians”: “The number of centenarians in the U.S. is growing rapidly … During the 1990s, the ranks of centenarians nearly doubled,” from about 37,000 counted at the start of the decade, to more than an estimated 70,000. However, as math teacher and ANSER analyst Kristin Lynch pointed out, “Doubling is not exponential growth.”

Math League Multimedia explains that “exponential notation is useful in situations where the same number is multiplied repeatedly. The number being multiplied is called the base, and the exponent tells how many times the base is multiplied by itself.” If the Census Bureau were right, what would the exponent be? If 37,000 had been multiplied by itself even once (37,000²), the product would have been 1.369 billion, not 70,000. Another decade of exponential growth and people over 100 would far outnumber everyone who had ever lived on Earth. (An exponent doesn’t have to be a whole number: 37,000^1.06 is approximately 70,000. At that relatively slow exponential rate, it would take more than a century for the number of centenarians to exceed a billion.) Too bad the Census Bureau didn’t specify the exponent.

The archive of American City Business Journals for 2000 showed 20 stories claiming exponential growth. Not one of them named the exponent.

VitalCast, a website for alternative health care information, was looking for a buyer only months “after exponential growth through the summer and fall,” reported The Business Journal, which in separate stories stated that “Super-premium, daily fee” golf courses are growing exponentially too, and that “Baby Boomers plus Generation X equals exponential returns on venture capital investments.”

Fury can be exponential too. “With no cure or prevention vaccine on the horizon, the exponential fury of the AIDS epidemic severely threatens entire cultures in the developing countries of the world,” stated The Business Journal.

Metris Cos. in the Twin Cities “employs 400 people locally”; a new facility “will house another 800 employees,” according to Minneapolis/St. Paul CityBusiness, which the journal called “exponential growth.” In 12 years, Metris would be the largest employer in the United States, if not for SAVI.

Scott Swerland of “SAVI, the men’s apparel and accessories retailer,” said, “We’ve grown from eight employees to about 50 employees … We are experiencing exponential growth,” according to the Eastside [of Puget Sound] Business Journal. If that exponential growth (approximately 8^1.88) continues, in 3 years, everyone on Earth (and a bunch of other planets) will work for SAVI, because the company will employ more than 194 billion people.

Clearly, the word exponential is being used loosely, but in technical and business writing, precision demands that numbers—and their exponents—be accurate.

—Words Into Type (Prentice-Hall, 1974)

—Puget Sound Business Journal, week of February 28, 2000.