A substitution.
I wondered to myself the other day what keeps bad ideas around and what keeps good ones down. If careful, methodical analysis as a means to establish fact or meaning truly was the intellectual way to resolve difficulties, clear up misunderstandings, and impart the light of civilization on the darkness of ignorance, then it would be infectious. Imagined another way, there exists some method, call it method X. Method X is a way of doing things. You employ this method to success, and have reason to suspect it will work again and for other things. Others observe this method, see it succeed, and employ it, similarly to success. And so on.
Intellect doesn't work that way. Not even close. The abstraction fails because methodical analysis is rigorous, and can lead to conclusions not in line with expectations. The rigor scares people away. I can't even count the number of people I've met in casual circumstances (and even some academic ones) who have shrunk at the mention of statistics. Just the mention! The common affectation being that that kind of analysis is for "math people," and the specifics of one's discipline are more important study material to bring the scientific method to bear. I'm certain you could draw analagous lines about law and rhetoric. About the analysis leading to unexpected outcomes: intellect loves when this happens and people hate when it does. To a scientist or logician, there is a wonderment in the unexpected outcome. Or at least there can be. Humans hate to be wrong, though. Hate hate hate it.
Logic. Poor old thing.
This is all pretty high-handed of me, and ironically exemplar of the exact writing style I'm talking about. I don't have the numbers and I don't have the proof. I have a handful of experiences and anecdotes that I've crafted to highlight a feature of jargon that I have observed. So before I go too far into it, I want to say that I don't have the right answer. I'm not absolutely certain that arranging my experiences this way is appropriate. And I in sincereness hope that the trend I see is imaginary. Ephemeral. Illusory.
That trend is to assert and validate information by authority. The argument has no logical, mathematical, or emotional basis. Just baldfaced statement of fact, often using previous statements in the argument as proof of later ones "it is this way, and I said it, so like I said it is this way," also often including allusions to personal involvement and success. I've brought up bullshit math before (uh, somewhere) and what I'm talking about now I can approximate as a near neighbor named crazy logic. Jargon helps both of these.
Specifically, and belaboredly, I'm talking about Magic: the Gathering tournament discussion. There's a barrier I have to overcome whenever I meet a new person whom I may tap to talk about tournament Magic. I don't have a word for it yet. That barrier is the fact that so much information is available and shared that it is then summarized or ignored for lack of capability to handle all of it. I don't think I'm all that much smarter than this theoretical new person. I don't think I'm that much more skilled. I know for a fact that I am less enamoured of all the mental shortcuts and truisms that absolutely every other tournament player I have ever talked to takes as granted.
Jargon makes all these mental shortcuts possible.
Magic certainly needs a lot of mental shortcuts. As the most complex game in the world with ever-evolving sets of allowed cards and an ever-expanding library of game mechanics, it would be impossible to start from an analytical square one. So we abstract, we condense, we simplify. Stick to the general rule and you don't need to go through the weighty analysis that leads to the true answer. Jargon words crop up to fill in this role beautifully. Aggro, combo, control, card advantage, tempo, cold, awkward, brew or brewing, archetype (and the various specific archetype words), beats, topdeck, on-tilt, mise, punt, matchup (good, bad, or as a listed percentage), threats, answers, optimal, best. I'm sure there are lots and lots more that come up frequently in talking about Magic tournament play. And now some words I would expect to hear from the activity but never do. Craftsmanship, endurance (or tough, durable, persistant), stochastic, marginalize (marginal comes up but only used to mean "a little" or "slightly"), better, sportsmanship, honesty, integrity, cost vs. benefit, expressive, unique.
I don't mean to say that use of jargon words in this capacity is bad. It is, however, irresponsible of an article writer to use them, unqualified, all over the place as a substitute for the analysis or argument that the writer is, presumably, tasked with performing. When you use a jargon word, you are compressing meaning into a smaller space. The trick works well if both you and the other guy are using the same compression algorithm. In an article, this is a woeful and desperate gamble at best, and the possibility for failure is magnified with every additional jargon word used. How much safer would it be to use some specific language? You wouldn't need to pad out the article so much, and you could establish a stronger article. Why not employ method X?
Same reason as before, really. The entire fucking house of cards would come tumbling down. These non-arguments are held together by overuse of jargon. Writer states facts in jargon terms. Readers accept terms at their various levels of understanding, accepting the source as an authority and therefore the statements as valid. The jargon then becomes a meaning variable, with each reader filling in whatever meaning will serve to validate the argument. The circle amounts to meaning laundering, writer to jargon word to reader, with feedback in comments closing the loop. Praise a writer for a bad article, and you'll never get anything better. This is jargon used as a blunt instrument. I know what I'm talking about and this proves it and I'm going to bash it into your head.
Used sparingly, jargon can be a tool of precision. In terms of Magic and the kind of articles I've been talking about so far, I feel a full-on reboot is necessary. The words we have (the first list above comprises a few) have been too overused, too worn out, to stretched to mean just anything we want. With deck archetypes, for example, I can state a single word and someone in the know would instantly call to mind a list of cards to within 10 or so of precision, a gameplan that the deck uses to win, and perhaps even personal experiences with watching it operate. Jund. Faeries. Dredge. I don't think it is a coincidence that the more specific terms are the ones I like.
As long as I'm just trying to call it to mind, the word serves it's purpose. Analysis requires greater precision, though. In the world of Magic, a difference of 10 cards could be huge. A difference of 1 card in a deck could be huge (just to show I'm not being any more arbitrary than suits the idea). Not only does this harm individual understandings, but also sweeping interpretation. By keeping this collection of terms around, we are drawn to evaluate in those terms. Is this deck an aggro deck? How often will this give me card advantage? What are my tempo grabbers? Or, what's good in this format? What's the stone cold nuts? Can I make this more controllish?
None of this shit means anything and we parade it around as if it does. For today I'm being nitpicky about a hobby in the sphere of nerddom. What would it mean, though, if the topic were international finance, energy engineering, global health, or social science? Most anything that can be a topic has jargon words, and whenever you can use them you can misuse them. So how to know?
Anything you can state you can state plainly. If a sentence cannot have the same meaning without jargon as with, then it doesn't mean anything. That jargon word is a sap, rather than a rapier. And it's a sap who doesn't call the writer out on it.