It would be nice if everyone spoke the same language and every word had the same meaning. No need in translation, no misunderstandings occur… And people attempted to invent world languages for example Esperanto. However that didn’t work, maybe because of a motivation problem. Finally, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Everybody wants to learn English. Soon Utopia would come to the world and everyone could understand everyone else.
That doesn’t happen. And I don’t talk about accents. We of course, can understand each other in shops and in other similar simple situations. But its far more problematic to understand people, not of your own group, when they speak of their interests. Each group has its own jargon, its own vocabulary.
Where does the trouble come from? Obviously there are special terms for specific needs. Every science and every trade has its own terminology. Doctors need names for our health problems and businessmen need them for our business problems. But if only it were just terms… There are other reasons for jargon use. For example, it is a way to hide information from outsiders (prison slang) or to identify group affiliations ( to protect discussions from amateurs in the German school of philosophy). And last but not least, jargon could be used to hide the emptiness of the speaker’s (writer’s) thoughts.
Albert Einstein said about explanations – “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In my opinion, it’s desirable to use this principle more often.
P.S. Oops. I forgot about poetry.
myprobetothink 