Professor Bruce Robbins of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, who teaches classes in literary theory, makes it a habit of giving his students an unusual, although unofficial, assignment: going home and explaining what they’ve learned to their parents.
“Translation is essential,” Robbins said.
Translation may seem an odd necessity to understand the subject of an English class, at least if the language you commonly speak is English, but Robbins’ assignment reflects a growing trend: the specialization of vocabulary within academic disciplines to the point where it becomes almost another language.
Take this description, lifted from the course catalog of the anthropology department: “Examines myth (as a metaphorical act) and its discourses (mythologies, as local systems of myths, and mythologies as metadiscourses on local systems of myths). Not a survey of myths and mythologies but a reading of particular texts that present myths within the epistemological aporias of anthropology as a discipline, and specific myths in cross-cultural context.” To a non-anthropologist, like me, this passage is inscrutable—although I know that the terms I cannot interpret are defining a context that two anthropologists would immediately understand.
This specialized discourse, whatever field it arises in, can be off-putting—hence the pejorative term “academic jargon.” For those who don’t “speak the language,” the experience of listening to two people who do can be about as much fun hanging out with two of your friends after they have both watched Napoleon Dynamite without you. It sets reference points that are common to some but not to others. But what is such language really doing, and why does it become so different from the speech you exchange with your parents?
A lot of so-called “jargon” has to do with the need for specialists to “express themselves more precisely than with ordinary language,” according to the first chapter of Economics: Principles and Applications. This is something that most people, at least when they think of the sciences, accept automatically: no one is surprised that botanists, for example, refer to a plant by its Latin name, rather than calling it “that smallish one with the big, purple flowers.”
“Science has its terms, and literary criticism and philosophy have theirs. These terms have varied histories,” wrote Patricia Dailey of the English and comparative literature department in an e-mail.
But this vocabulary is not foolproof and it can be misused, as Dailey emphasized. “The use of complex terms only has a meaning if it’s used in an intelligent and informed way,” she wrote. “What we mean by “jargon” really only means that someone is not providing a substantial or correct account for the language that they are brandishing. It is substituting for substantial thought.”
On the other hand, the language you choose does more than just express your meaning. “Obviously, when someone uses the vocabulary correctly, it identifies them as having a certain knowledge and background,” psychology professor Robert Krauss said. “Language has this expressive function. It helps identify who you are.” Thus when people use academic vocabulary, they are identifying themselves in a certain way—as university students, as professors, as academics.
Knowing how to “talk the talk,” though, does not mean that you have to do it all the time. Krauss, whose research focuses on way that people speak differently in different situations, said, “All of us have this ability to vary the way we speak,” explaining that these variations occur not just in the different words we choose, but also in the way we articulate them—in the very sounds we make. We all have a number of identities that we draw on more strongly at different times. People who speak one way with their friends, may speak another way with their parents, and yet another way with their teachers. Academic vocabulary becomes one of these several possible identities for those who can use it.
But the format of the language, like any outward signs of identity, should not be confused with or valued more highly than its meaning, as Robbins’s “translation” assignment makes clear. “If you can’t explain it in ordinary language to people who haven’t taken the course,” he said, “then you didn’t really learn it.”