On 2013-10-26 17:37, Jan Faul wrote: > > ON JARGON: AN ILLUMINATING HISTORY OF SPECIALIST SPEECH > > by Brian Dillon Sounds like a fascinating book, maybe I'll find time to read it. And this looks like a good opportunity to quote James Nicoll on the "purity" of the English language: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. (Back to me) There are areas of English where we have four terms for something, derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the Norman French, the Greek, and the Latin. "Jargon" is mostly these days taken to mean specialized, probably technical, terminology. I'm a computer programmer and a science fiction fan, which puts me squarely at the source of a lot of the more annoying jargon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries -- we've been busily inventing so much new stuff, we needed ways to talk about it. (The old jargon.txt file from the ARPAnet, later expanded and published as The Hacker's Dictionary, shows how strongly SF fandom's jargon influenced computer jargon.) -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info Nikon DSLR photo list: http://d4scussion.com
