The History of Jargon
Hello,
Today I’m taking a look at jargon, inspired by my reading this week – “This is Going to Hurt” by Adam Kay. It’s the very witty, and thought-provoking diary of a junior doctor during the first six years of his work on the maternity wards of Britain’s NHS (publicly funded medical care). You may have read it yourself, or seen the excellent BBC adaptation starring Ben Whislaw (who will always be Paddington Bear to me but is a super actor in human form too).
Medical staff, by necessity, use precise terms (often from Latin) to ensure clarity in treatment of their patients, but we all know they have secret terms for tricky patients and incidents too. His revelations on that topic got me thinking about jargon in general. I used plenty of it in my former career in computing. Most jobs come with a scattering of jargon. Sometimes this is to exclude the customers and hide your irritation (yes users is spelled with an L if you’re on a tech support desk), other times it’s the quickest way to convey important information, and often it is simply the work terms which only insiders need to know.
If you’re frustrated with obscure jargon associated with somebody’s work, consider for a moment – do you have specialist terms in your own occupation? Susie Dent even got an entire book out of the topic – “Modern Tribes” which I read earlier this year.
Where does the word jargon itself spring from?
Jargon is one the French gave us. It entered English in the mid 1300s from Old French jargoun. At that time in French jargoun described the chattering, particularly of birds – much as we might use chirping today. It may have sneaked into English as a term for idle talk or thieves’ slang slightly earlier but the first use usually quoted is in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” where he links jargon to the birds.
Some sources believe jargon in French was derived from the Latin verb gaggire (to chatter) which described speech the listener didn’t understand, but not all the dictionaries agree on that one. Either way, jargon is a surprisingly old word and has changed its use with time, as words often do.
During the British colonial period, even as early as the 1640s, jargon was a synonym of pidgin – used to bridge the gap between two people without a shared language using a few key phrases and words. This gave it an association with being an incomplete, or confusing subset of English and led to the idea of it being gibberish. From the late 1600s but definitely by the 1980s, jargon’s definition became more restricted when it was firmly associated with technical or specialised subsets of language such as the medical terminology I was reading this week, although I suspect even in Chaucer’s time certain jobs had their own jargon.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
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