As you know (because you’re on my website), I’m a tone-of-voice copywriter. And one of the things I work really hard to avoid/eliminate is jargon (even though one could argue that ‘tone of voice’ itself is jargon…). My particular pet hate is corporate twaddle like ‘leverage’ (just say ‘use’), ‘pivot’ (I think you mean ‘change’), ‘align’ ( or we could just ‘agree’?)… you get the gist. Most of these words are designed for one thing – to make people in suits sound smarter than they are. But jargon actually has the opposite effect. That’s because it’s like a secret code, and excludes anyone who doesn’t understand it (i.e. almost everyone).
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the reason we’re here – where does the word ‘jargon’ come from? Turns out it has a surprisingly avian background.
J’accuse les oiseaux
Come with me on a quick trip to 12th-century France where ye olde French people were using the word ‘jargon’ to describe the twittering of birds. Why? Well, it’s pure onomatopoeia (more jargon, sorry), which is when a word imitates or suggests the sound it describes (other examples include ‘oink’, ‘cuckoo’ and ‘tick tock’).
So how did we get from ‘tweet tweet’ in a French accent to ‘leveraging strategic alignment’? By the late 1300s, ‘jargon’ had crossed the Channel into Middle English, mutating along the way from meaningless twittering into an insult for human speech that sounded like rubbish. It actually turns up in (my favourite, not) The Canterbury Tales to describe a drunk man talking shite:
‘And then he took a sop in fine clarre,
And upright in his bedde then sat he.
And after that he sang full loud and clear,
And kiss’d his wife, and made wanton cheer.
He was all coltish, full of ragerie
And full of jargon as a flecked pie.’
(Translation: Drunk old man marries a much younger woman (sigh), gets pissed to try to boost his ‘stamina’ for their wedding night, then does some drunk singing and can’t stop talking – the ‘flecked pie’ is referring to a magpie BTW, not a steak and kidney.)
Time to call in the professionals
In the 1600s, the meaning of ‘jargon’ changed again. As professions like law, medicine and trade guilds expanded, so did technical terminology – lots of it recycled from Latin – that everyday people couldn’t follow. And it wasn’t long before people started called that ‘jargon’.
This guy’s definitely just said something ‘resonated’ with him.
Another much more exciting type of jargon also arose at this time – ‘thieves’ cant’. This was a cryptolect (I did it again, sorry) or secret language spoken by criminals, beggars, vagrants and itinerant traders across GB from the early 16th century right up to the 19th. It wasn’t a completely distinct language with its own grammar though – instead it was a substitution cipher (bit more jargon there) meaning it swapped standard nouns, verbs and adjectives for metaphors, archaic terms and words borrowed from other languages to hide the meaning from eavesdropping constables or unsuspecting victims. Unlike many other oral dialects that vanished without a trace, thieves’ cant was surprisingly well-documented because lots of writers at the time were fascinated by the criminal underworld.
One term that you probably already know from thieves’ cant is ‘fence’, a word for someone who buys stolen goods. Here are a few more examples that you may or may not have come across:
ken – house
bob ken – a house that can easily be robbed
boozing ken – a pub
darkmans – night
glymmer – fire
cully – a victim.
Same as it ever was
Fast forward to today and we still use the term jargon to describe any language that’s only understood by a small group of people (I had a colleague who used to say jargon is fine ‘between consenting adults’). So the next time someone you work with asks you to ‘circle back on low-hanging fruit to optimise bandwidth’, you can tell them they’re part of a long and storied tradition of talking absolute bollocks. (Oh, and send them my way.)