In Khayalitsha - a big township close to Cape Town, South Africa - the word 'bombastic' has taken on a new meaning, for the people I know, at least. 'Bombastic' is used to mean rhetorical language which is jargon-filled - largely because of people's experience of political 'leaders' (or 'intellectuals') using particular sets of jargon as code-words, thrown around to define and enforce political groups (so, for instance, SACP members are fond of referring to ultra-leftism, and Lenin's 'Left wing communism', because it gives them the rhetorical flourish of referring to the 'infantile disorder' of their opponents). In the mass meetings which have in the past (less these days) characterised South African politics, this kind of language spreads like wildfire.
In the ANC camps in Tanzania, a similar process happened - with youth using slogans like 'Down with imperialism!', 'Down with Apartheid!'. The fact that this was in fact jargon was brought home to a friend of mine (who was a teacher in one of the camps) when some young people quietely came to ask him one day: 'What is Apartheid?'. Having been born outside of SA, they did not know.
Every concept simultaneously allows us to grasp something, and obscures something at the same time. Trying to hold the composition of a concept in mind - an idea of where it comes from, what its use is and what its limits are - is not easy. And the use of concepts is a process of definition - a process of defining not just the world, but my relation to it. All of this combines, in my experience, with the result that people use a word when it seems appropriate ('dialectic', 'imperialism', 'reformism'), with the effect that the word often masks more than it clarifies.
In my experience, trying to develop a 'Marxism in plain English' way of explaining, understanding and discussing things is not just an academic exercise - it has useful political results, in that it forces both people familiar with Marxism, and those unfamiliar with Marxist ideas, to try and unpack and understand deeply the concepts used in Marxist analyses. You're right when you say explaining things in a dozen different ways is not easy - but finding a set of terms which is rooted in comrades' concrete experience of the world (rather than just using 'received' terms) is in my opinion a necessary step towards a truly self-emancipatory politics.
You can't do it in 3 weeks (the educationals and discussions we have in Cape Town often take a very long time to complete the discussion of a topic), but if you don't do it, you end up with some very skewed relationships between comrades who are meant to be equals.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.