here's your monthly (/ yearly) reminder to use simple language wherever possible.
bonus content:
I had years of employment yelling educated professionals and industry leaders: "No poop on ground." in as many ways as I could to get it across.
On more than one occasion I pointed at sewage "Poop", then at the ground, "Ground", and then "No." It got the job done more than data points about fecal coliform and ecoli contamination ever did.
The saddest part is that academics don't like obscure language either. No one does. They use it either because they have to (e.g. it actually makes things clearer) or because they feel they have to.
I'm gonna pin that "they feel they have to" on English teachers, many of whom seem to enjoy taking out their grammar hobby on their students.
"How to write consistently boring scientific literature" by Kaj Sand-Jensen is a good, quick read
Nothing groundbreaking, but fun
Jargon isn't inherently bad, but it's often weilded for evil. When a scientist uses jargon it's usually for precision and clarity. But corporations and conmen use it to obfuscate, confuse, and add a veneer of science/legitimacy to their bullshit.
Jargon is great when the word used is the most accurate word for that thing, describing why it exists and what its purpose is.
Jargon is terrible when they start using that as a synonym for a simpler word, and want to sound busy and smart
Respect synonym of simpler words, nothing more hilarious as the German "Amtssprache".
nicht lebende Einfriedung (non-living enclosure) = Zaun (fence)
raumübergreifendes Großgrün (large vegetation that extends spatially) = Baum (tree)
Lautraum (soundspace) = Diskothek
Grundstücksentwässerungsanlage (Land drainage system) = Regenrinne (gutter)
Einachsiger Dreiseitenkipper (Single-axle three-sided tipper) = Schubkarre (wheelbarrow)
Personenvereinzelungsanlage (Personal isolation facility) = Drehkreuz (turnable)
Grüngutsammelplatz (Green goods collection point) = Komposthaufen (compost heap)
Bedarfsgesteuerte Fußgängerfurt (Demand-controlled pedestrian crossing) = Ampel (pedestrian traffic light)
Lebensberechtigungsbescheinigung (Certificate of eligibility for life) = Stammbuch (family tree)
these are hilarious. i just don't get the last one. "Lebensberechtigungsbescheinigung"? when would you use that?
You need it when you request an ID card or Passport, it's a birth certificate or family book.
ooh yeah ok
Reading a German journal must be exhausting
Not so if you know German, but the reading is slower as normal. German words are often very long, but only because it is a compound word, which in other lenguages need a whole sentence to say the same. The advantage is that it is very easy to invent new words in German which everybody understand, but this is also used often used in legal jargon in an absurd and not needed way. German is a very flexible language with not so much grammatic, the most difficult are the articles. A very precise and uniform pronunciation of the letters in the alphabet used in a word (same as in Spanish), not so in English or French, where letters have different phonetics in different words.
i think the legal speak is actually charming, somehow. it's often much more precise than what we would say in our everday-language. kinda like programming, very precise. but i guess it can be really challenging for somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience with the german language yet.
Yeah, but as said it's often not really needed, everybody knows what is a tree or a fence, there isn't any need to use an absurd wordmonster which isn't more precise, only fucking up the people in documents.
How should layman distinguish between the two, if they don't understand it?
It's easy to see why conmen use it: if you know, you won't buy it anyway; if you don't know you might think it's legit because the guy sounds like a scientist.
In the lead up to getting fired for being disabled, HR (and everyone I spoke to) switched exclusively to bullshit legal jargon instead of just talking to me like a human. It was confusing and alienating, which I think was the point. Had to pull out a dictionary for every Slack message.
Corporate abuse of language is frustrating. I've worked with a lot of product manager types that really want to use extra words. "Let's just swag it". "We need to force rank these initiatives". "Can you do a research spike this sprint?"
It's too often to obfuscate abusive conditions in contracts, written at the end in a thick paragraph and long sentences with 3p fonts (dark patterns).
We had a guy that was famous for wanting to use the latest words. Everytime he heard a new buzzword or jargon, he'd basically be a child with a new toy and use it every other sentence for the coming month.
Could have been a scene in American Psycho
I hope you used to feed him words you'd made up.
He's just operationalizing his vocabulary.
Research has consistently shown those staff have the lowest productivity and also love AI.
Yes. This is what the term 'technocratic jargon' refers to.
There's the misunderstanding that a summary must compress as much info in as few sentences as possible. But it just needs to give a quick overfiew.
Hrmm.
I’m not an academic. I’m an engineer. I’m guessing academic jargon is similar to technical jargon.
Yesterday I heard the price of “memory” was going up and was left to wonder if that is RAM, SSD, HDD, EEPROM, FRAM, NOR data flash, …
And pictured the news presenter saying “shut up, nerd!”
I pity psychologists. Imagine how many people want to chew their ear off about narcissism, emotional labor, gaslighting, or whatever self-help pop psychologists are grifting about today.
I've always associated 'memory' with RAM. HDDs and SSDs are 'storage'. (And the average user probably shouldn't have to know what EEPROMs are.)
To be clear, most scientists struggle with reading many papers. So it's not a problem with technical specificity, it's a problem with fundamentally bad writing.
In science, unparseable writing mainly comes from the fact that people aren't told that you need to prioritize being clear. It's the principle behind the curse of knowledge - it's easy to forget that people don't know what you know and don't think the way you think. So you end up writing in a way that only you can interpret. It takes extra effort and time to read back what you wrote and think about how other people might understand what you wrote. But that's time that a grad student could otherwise spend being further exploited, so QA ends up falling to the wayside
Thats true, the whole system of writing is poorly taught. The purpose of writing is to convay the meaning in a suitable manner - but, what exactly is a suitable manner? Well that depends on a variety of factors such as the intended audience, subject, purpose of writing, technicality, etc. There just isn't a singular lexicon (dictionary) - as such, reverting back to more generally known words is better design than using unrelated lexicons.
In addition, general lexicons may have issues with ambiguity. But they also can be explicitly defined using contextual cues. The point in writing is so its understandable not extravagant.
I pity psychologists. Imagine how many people want to chew their ear off about narcissism, emotional labor, gaslighting, or whatever self-help pop psychologists are grifting about today.
Honestly, as it relates to academics and papers, psychology isn't too bad from what I've read. There are wildly varying definitions, but papers have had ways to account for that for decades - that being defining terms where needed, and showing your work so others can see the context. For example, if studying depression, they'll have to specify which scale or metric was used for depression in patients, be it a mood tracker, or a standardize questionnaire. That said, you could always tell when a paper wasn't well constructed or had little to offer, because thats when the jargon would be front and centre.
That, and more purely philosophical academic papers. They were awful. For example, reading a thirteen-page paper that could wholly be summarised as "Positionality is how people define themselves relative to others. They may have biases based on these definitions." but written like, "subject-position is based on a subject's temporal elements to best target the dominant drive in a social confrontation..." I have no problem reading most articles, but those were putting me to sleep.
At least my dad was formally diagnosed, so I'm not bullshitting my therapist.
Yeah I get that people can get defensive when they are overwhelmed by jargon, but thats the beauty of language. We have so many different words that means such complex things. Its what allowed us to keep developing technology based on the layer below it. People need to get over not understanding every single word in a scientist paper, as if it's an attack on their intelligence.
And hell I know AI gets alot of hate on Lemmy but that shit is very good at helping break down complex scientific papers with the jargon. I work in medical research and the amount of time it's saved by helping me understand the jargon has been immense.
I’m not going to jump down your throat for suggesting AI, but I’ll mention that Wikipedia often has a “Simple English” link in the Languages section that’s a godsend for ESL people and scientific/academic subjects for lay people.
Huh damn I had no idea. Thanks, I'll try this next time.
Tbh, the jargon is probably clearer than the translation is. You just need to learn what words mean.
Yeah that chemistry/physics example at the end of the OP is dog shit as an example. The summary butchers a lot of the actual meaning and if anything makes some of it more vague.
The jargon is precise, the translation can provide intuition. You often need both to get the full depth of a concept across. Good academic communication should be a mix of both, with introductions/overviews/conclusions/remarks interspersed along the way to help and conduct the reader, while the precise elements are also given in parallel to explain the technical aspects. Often in presentations the hardest bit is determining the level of precision that is expected by the audience. And usually, the format is intuition first, precise, jargon-heavy details afterwards.
Maybe the cognitive load for reading jargon (and looking up each word you don't know its meaning each time you stumble upon them) is higher than when reading text written in simple language
Possibly, but I’m pretty sure the “translation” doesn’t actually mean anything while the technical jargon is actually telling you something. What does an ion being “floofier” even mean? If I’m trying to communicate something about ions to someone and I’m “translating”, I’ll need to translate multiple times and ways to make it make sense to multiple people, when the listener could go look up the technical jargon themselves and get the idea of the statement.
Technical jargon exists for a reason, it is truly simpler than using ambiguous language because you don’t need to keep explaining yourself to get one concept across. Complicated concepts need very specific words, can’t always use 5th grade reading level material.
You know, I have a PhD in chemistry. I started off trying to explain what "floofier" means in ELI5, but honestly, I can't. Not without writing several pages, diving deeper and deeper.
In this case, it is the nephelauxetic effect, which literally translates to "cloud expanding". But that's not an accurate translation either, because it's only a very specific bit of the electron cloud for a specific ion in a specific spot in a molecule.
There are at least half a dozen ways to make an ion "floofier" that don't apply here and/or wouldn't be paper worthy at all.
I had a customer that didn't want to accept that I made a change to fix an issue with the simple explanation and demanded to know exactly what changed. He told me to shut up and just do the change before I finished the first sentence with the detailed technic explanation and never asked again for details. Sometimes that's how things go.
Nothing worse than legal jargon
ChatGPT at home
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