Jargon
Every human era is new in the sense of creating new words. New inventions, new experiences, new ways of knowing, they all lead to new words. People in modern times made up many such words but they also created words that did not want to be words, words that obfuscated, prevaricated, and cast a fog over whatever proceedings they were supposed to define. These words went beyond the flimflam of double talk and entered various realms of deceit, avoidance, pretension, hypocrisy, and cynicism. Modern times were rich in crimes against language, crimes that—it goes without saying—continue.
Jargon is an act of will. Someone or some group (“group think” being a modern phrase) uses language for the purpose of conveying or enforcing a concept. Although this concept can be rendered in language that already exists, the feeling is that new words will make it more palatable or less objectionable or more important sounding or more somehow scientific. The latter objective was very common since Marxists, beginning with Engels, wished to consider Marxism with its notions of “dialectical materialism” and supposedly inevitable consequences to be “scientific socialism.” In another, though related domain, practitioners of the social sciences sought to dignify the scientific aspect of their endeavor with language that stressed the “ization” of any notion or by grouping nouns together as in “thought management technique.”
The Soviet Union, as it sought to incarnate the prophecies of Marx, made jargon into a domain that became so arcane the word Kremlinology entered the language. A Kremlinologist followed the changes in the often opaque official language in an attempt to figure out what was occurring behind the scenes. The colossal act of will that defined the Soviet Union, the building of a communist society according to various confused yet “scientific” notions abetted by generous doses of murderous terror, created a grotesque brew of jargon and euphemism. “Enemies of the people” were “liquidated” routinely, which meant that anyone who fell afoul of the official apparatus might be murdered. If the government intended to “carry on the inquiry” then arrests were imminent. The remorseless certainty that such language imparted, the sense of an unimpeachable code that was a world unto itself, made the killing that much easier. Language placed a screen in front of death, almost as if death were no longer death but some worthless footnote to the annals of Marxist-Leninist progress.
As a modern state obsessed with its version of reality, the United States was not immune to the allure of such language. When the nation committed itself to the Vietnam conflict, it was an act of “Americanization.” When the nation decided it could not win such a war, it began to disengage under the banner of “de-Americanization” or “Vietnamization.” As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger well understood, such words were preferable to saying that the nation had participated in an untenable conflict in which Vietnam’s social fabric was devastated, a landscape obliterated, and tens of thousands of people killed for no purpose beyond the loss of face attendant upon the collapse of a client state which had devolved from French hands into American ones. Such language sanitized misery and put a resolute face on ignominy.
The conniving duplicity of princes was one thing. The wish to avoid reality was another. The language that cloaked the annihilating capacities of nuclear weapons read like an attempt to make the unthinkable into something not only thinkable but, if necessary, doable. To speak of “tactical” or “strategic” nuclear weapons, as if the use of such weapons were some chess move, was to enter a domain in which reality was purely hypothetical. Since human beings had to live with these weapons, it must have seemed best to those who spent their days pondering what place such weapons had in the scheme of war and peace to come up with words that softened the blunt horror of the weapons. Such words made hideous scenarios seem not quite so hideous. Once again, jargon and euphemism went together down the same unholy path. Behind “tactical” lay those “surgical” air strikes and bombing missions that have been touted since WWII and continue to be touted into the twenty-first century and “The War on Terror” (a phrase that in its unitary mania surely will baffle later ages). To apply such a word as “surgical” was a gross misapprehension and outright lie but reassuring, as if the fineness of a surgeon’s movements could be correlated with a plane or missile.
Modern people were adept at strategizing, conceptualizing, and theorizing about all layers of existence from nuclear weapons to sex to reading novels. Much “izing” went on, particularly in academia in what were once called “the humanities.” In some hands, the abstractions were a means to lasso often recalcitrant realities or propose structures not discernible to the casual or commonsense eye. In other hands, language became a means of outright mind control, jargon being a way to shut people down and keep them down. Beyond the sometimes ludicrous antics of politically correct language that sought, for instance, to soften characterizations of debilities and stereotypes, lay reams of language that sought to redo reality and remake human beings, language that was, in effect, an ultimatum. One sad privilege of modern times has been the avowal of such ultimatums and thus the assumption of moral and political superiority.
The great critic of modern jargon was George Orwell, a writer who bore eloquent witness to what he termed a “catalogue of swindles and perversions.” Orwell’s criticisms of slovenly and careless usages became standard reading for anyone trying to write decent English, but his imaginative foray in 1984 into the depths of misuse and abuse revealed something like psychosis at the heart of modern times, a ruination of language that went along with the ruination of the human spirit. What Orwell saw in modern times was the manipulation of basic perceptions so that black might be white and up might be down. Thus there was no “bad.” There was “ungood.” “Joycamp” was “Forced Labor Camp.” Everything could be manipulated.
In a world in which, for instance, “re-education camps” were places for tortures and executions, Orwell’s fictive inventions were not inventions. There seemed in modern times no end to the mockery of language, though there remained poetry. Wallace Stevens wrote it without apologies, “Say this to Pravda, tell the damned rag / That the peaches are slowly ripening.”
A superb essay....
Or sometimes, as Woody Guthrie sang, “the peaches are rottening.”
Orwell: “Words should be windowpanes.”