Jargon in Academia and Organizing

My friend Jane recently wrote a good blog post on the importance and difficulty of communicating across various barriers.

I've been considering how to communicate across disciplines, departments, socio-economic barriers, and cultural identities.... At times, I feel like a chameleon when deciding how to speak to one person or another. What type of slang should I use? Should I cuss? Should I get out my biggest words and stand up straight? Communication is tough.

I took one of the points she made and ran with it, because it is something I have been struggling with too - how to talk about social issues as you move from academia to organizing, specifically what to do about jargon.

I posted my thoughts on Jane's group blog, but I am copying them here because I liked how it came out.

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[When out and about in the world...] My working hypothesis is only use jargon or an uncommon word when:

(1) it articulates an important concept that is not captured in another, simpler word or short phrase. Anything beyond this is jargon that shouldn't exist at all, not in academics and not in daily life.

(2) when it adds a necessary level of complexity to the topic or task at hand. Some jargon does deserve to exist, in that it captures a unique concept, but is rarely appropriate to use outside of academic treatments of a subject. Concepts that are laden with historical and structural detail are probably not worth introducing into a conversation if explaining them is not going to clarify the situation at hand. For example, you probably don't need to bring up orientalism when talking about today's immigration policy with your neighbor.

College educated social justice folks often screw up on both points because they fail to strike a balance. Most obviously they overdo it, using jargon that either shouldn't exist at all, or is inappropriate for the topic at hand.

But I want to focus on the less obvious mistake of underdoing it: dumbing things down so severely - either by censoring all uncommon words or jargon, or by oversimplifying a situation - that we fail to realistically depict the thing we are trying to communicate.

These mistakes can lead to paternalist and populist forms of engaging people. We disrespect folks by talking to them in ways that assume they are not capable of generating new and more complex thoughts, or assuming they haven't already. We do a disservice to them when we divide the world unrealistically into black and white, knowing there are shades of gray but thinking the best way to motivate others is to be harshly dualistic.

So I think we can use a little bit of jargon when engaging people if we are savvy about it. For example, it is worth making the sex/gender distinction (for those feminists who use it) when talking to a housewife about enrolling her son in gymnastics, or daughter in hockey.

The bottom line is this: the point of using any jargon should be to open up discussion, to clarify or deepen our understanding of a reality. This is in contrast to the example described by Jane, where the competitive graduate student uses it to close down discussion and obscure realities, thereby "winning" a debate or impressing others by virtue of befuddling them.

My only other thought is that we make sure to engage people conversationally, so any goofy words we want to use come up organically in response to the direction of the conversation. Too often we get into the habit of delivering mini lectures, a holdover from our socialization experience in the university classroom. And as we use any jargon, we should not assume people know what it means. Instead, volunteer to explain any concept as you bring it up, and make sure you have established an environment in which other people know they can feel comfortable interrupting you to ask for clarification. Let them know that doing so means you are being unclear, rather than that they are revealing ignorance.