Is "jargon" jargon, was Re: dead topix

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Dec 15 08:37:50 PST 1999



>Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> > So if you really want to get rid of jargon, you are going
> > to have to discover a way to give a 3-week equivalent
> > of a Yale education to people who barely got through
> > high school.

Missed this the first time around. I don't agree. One of the benefits of a Yale education, at least in my experience, is the exposure to how the bourgeoisie thinks and acts. I can look, act, and talk like them even though I find them largely repellent; this is a useful skill for both going undercover at their conferences and knowing how to address them on the rare occasions when they invite me. But also an advantage of a good formal education is, or should be, the capacity to take complex ideas and talk about them in relatively simple language. You don't need 20 years of schooling to understand the basics of Marxian class analysis; chances are you've experienced them every day of your life, but never heard them analyzed as such. I'm reminded of that ad in the parody Off The Wall Street Journal that came out around 1981 - a mock Smith Barney ad that had John Houseman standing in front of women working at a 19th century mill with the tagline, "We make money the old-fashioned way - *they* earn it." Make a complex point pretty pungently, no?

Doug



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