Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

56 Forbidden Words
Jargon. Gibridge, fustian language, Peddlar’s French; a barbarous jangling.
Jargonneur. A chatterer, gibridgemonger, counterfeit rogue that speaks fustian, or a
language which either himself or his hearers understand not. (R. Cotgrave, French–
English Dictionary. London: Whitaker 1650; quoted in Burke 1995: 2f)
And then there is Samuel Johnson’s definition:
Jargon. unintelligible talk; gabble; gibberish. (Johnson 1755)
English jargon retains vestiges of such meanings even today. Both Daniel
Defoe and Samuel Johnson referred to the trade language of the Mediterranean,
Levant and Indian coasts as jargon. Chinook Jargon, a combination of
Chinook, Nootka (and other Native American), English and French terms,
was the trade language of the north-west coast of America; it was used from
California to Alaska, after contact with American and British fur traders. In
Sense and Sensibility (begun in 1795 and published in 1811), Jane Austen
used the word jargon for what we would now call cliché:
‘It’s very true,’ said Marianne, ‘that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere
jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of
him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. 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.’
(Austen 1983: 62)
For most people, jargon came to be ‘applied contemptuously to any mode of
speech abounding in unfamiliar terms, or peculiar to a particular set of
persons, as the language of scholars or philosophers, the terminology of a
science or art, or the cant of a class, sect, trade, or profession’ (OED 6).
According to the Macquarie Dictionary, for example, this has now become
the primary sense. We define it as follows:
Jargon is the language peculiar to a trade, profession or other group; it is the language
used in a body of spoken or written texts, dealing with a circumscribed domain in
which speakers share a common specialized vocabulary, habits of word usage, and
forms of expression. 3
Jargons involve more than just lexical differences; they often differ from one
another grammatically, and sometimes phonologically or typographically.
This can be seen by comparing some of the requirements on the cricket field
with the two-line excerpt from a knitting pattern, and with the wedding
invitation below it, and by comparing all of these with the excerpt from a
Wordsworth poem and a text message version of it (such as might be
conveyed using the SMS (short message service) facility on a mobile phone):
A fast-medium right arm inswing bowler needs two or three slips, a deep third man, a
gully, a deepish mid-off, a man at deep fine leg and another at wide mid-on.