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Jargon Nouns and Acronyms
Jargon Nouns and Acronyms
67
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 69
the initials stand for nouns). There is no shortage of similar names in the
non-applied parts of the social sciences: Speech Exchange System,
Politeness System Theory, Phrase Structure Grammar, Leadership
Categorization Theory, etc and etc. In this and subsequent chapters, we
will come across further examples. For the present, I will mainly be
following the strategy, which I adopted in the previous chapter, of taking
my examples where I find them, rather than going out of my way to search
out especially choice cases.
My aim is to show the prevalence of nouns in the technical concepts that
contemporary social scientists devise. Also acronyms are particularly
visible in modern academic writing and these tend to be used for noun
phrases. I will be outlining the evidence from those linguists who suggest
that noun phrases, comprising solely nouns, represent one of the most
important linguistic developments in modern English and that they are
prominent in academic writing. But it is not sufficient merely to show that
this has occurred and that it is affecting academics as well as cricketing and
university administrators. I will need also to show why this nouny writing
might be such a problem in the social sciences.
In this chapter, I will be suggesting why the prevalence of nouns means
that the problem of pompous or starchy writing in the social sciences is not
adequately understood as being simply a problem of ‘jargon’. To be sure,
academic social scientists like to make up big words, and critics can
easily pounce on these big words as being unnecessary ‘jargon’. We have
already come across some nominal whoppers such as ‘massification’, ‘the
ideational metafunction’ and these will not be the last that we shall
encounter. But even if we removed the worst of these whoppers, there
would still be serious problems. The noun-based names and acronyms,
which I have just mentioned, do not rely on big confected words. Ordinary
nouns can be strung together, without intervening prepositions. ‘Picture’,
‘exchange’, ‘communication’ and ‘system’ are all non-technical words in
common usage, just as ‘umpire’, ‘decision’ and ‘referral’ are. A sense of
technicality can also come from the way that such words are combined,
and not just from the individual elements of that combination.
As well as looking at the predominance of nouns in social scientific
jargon, I will also discuss some of the implications of this for those who
might defend or criticize the use of technical concepts in the social
sciences. By and large, both the critics and the defenders overlook the
prevalence of nouns, not grasping why it might be significant that so many
of the concepts, which offend the critics and which the defenders believe
to improve on common language, are nouns or noun phrases. If we ignore
this aspect, we will be unable to pinpoint what is going wrong with social
scientific writing.
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70 Learn to Write Badly
As I hope to show in this and the following chapter, the real problem is
not that social scientists invent too many big words, although that is a
problem; but the real difficulty is that the big words tend to be nouns, not
verbs. This means that general denunciations of social scientific writing
for containing ‘too much jargon’ do not get to the heart of the matter. It is
because social scientists, when trying to describe and explain what people
do, fill their prose with nouns that they end up writing both awkwardly and
imprecisely.
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 71
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72 Learn to Write Badly
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 73
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74 Learn to Write Badly
has become second-nature to us and serves only to muddy our prose for
the general reader’ (p. 196). He does not discuss the possibility that jargon
may also be muddying prose for specialists.
Although we should try to avoid jargon, nevertheless, according to
Bem, it cannot always be avoided because jargon serves ‘a number of
legitimate functions in scientific communication’ (p. 196). A specialized
term may be ‘more precise or freer of surplus meaning than any natural
language equivalent’ (p. 196). Bem gives the examples of ‘attitude’ and
‘reinforcement’: both, he suggests, are more precise and freer from sur-
plus meaning than the equivalent ordinary language terms, ‘disposition’
and ‘reward’. These terms show that technical language can make impor-
tant conceptual distinctions ‘not apprehended by the layperson’s vocabu-
lary’ (p. 196).
The idea that specialists need a vocabulary, which is free from the
surplus meaning of ordinary language, is interesting, but it does not
match the usual practice of social scientists, including psychologists.
Almost always when social scientists feel the need to invent new terms,
they construct them out of ordinary language concepts, as Bourdieu’s
‘habitus’ builds on ‘habit’ and ‘massification’ on ‘mass’. As Valsiner and
van der Veer (2000) point out, social scientists, unlike many natural
scientists, do not create wholly neutral concepts, freed from associations
with ordinary language. Valsiner and van der Veer give the example of
‘attachment’, which many social and developmental psychologists use as a
technical concept. This term retains connections with ordinary language
and with ordinary life (such as a mother feeling attached to her child). It
carries what Bem might term surplus meaning, but then so do both
‘attitude’ and ‘reinforcement’. When social scientists devise technical
concepts, they make sure that they bear the echoes of messy, ordinary
life and its ordinary messy concepts. Yet, even as they do this, they seem to
justify their special concepts, by claiming them to be more precise, and
having fewer associations, than the concepts of ordinary language.
Those, who accuse social scientists of creating jargon for jargon’s sake,
suspect them of aggrandizing themselves through their big words.
Certainly academics, in general, have a particular fondness for using
longer words than journalists or fiction writers (Biber, 1988). Nothing
illustrates the love of social scientists for extra syllables than the history of
the word ‘methodology’. In the early nineteenth century, the word was
used to describe the study of methods, especially scientific methods.
Works about methodology, at that time, would be expected to discuss
different ways of collecting evidence and arranging classifications. In the
past fifty years, the word has been used to describe the particular methods
that researchers might use. In this sense, the term is used as a synonym for
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 75
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76 Learn to Write Badly
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 77
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78 Learn to Write Badly
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 79
Verbs as servants
In the big houses of the eighteenth century, the great families displayed
their wealth and social standing as they lavishly entertained guests. Heavy
plates of food would be carried to great tables; glasses would be filled with
yet more drink; tea and coffee would be poured into fine china cups; and
all the while the hosts and their guests would continue their polite,
elevating conversations. They would barely pause to see who was bearing
the salvers of food, decanters of wine or pots of coffee. So it is linguistically
with the writings of the social sciences today. The great nouns are
assembled, sometimes bedecked with elegant modifiers and sometimes
aloof in isolated importance. No one notices the great burden carried by
the humble verbs, as they bear the weight of the grandly gathered clusters
of nouns in sentence after sentence.
Often in the social sciences, it is insufficient only to notice what is
present; one has to be aware of absences. In the distribution of key
concepts, we can see nouns, noun phrases and occasional adjectives.
Verbs are the great absentees. In none of the works cited is a verb listed
as a key or basic concept. Yet, all social scientists must write their senten-
ces with verbs.
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 83
in the social world. ‘Noun saturation point’ would be one such string
which bears the mark of academia rather than the world of journalism.
There are, of course, many others in the social sciences: ‘language acquis-
ition device’, ‘gene-environment correlation’, ‘user-behaviour manage-
ment’ and so on. As we shall see in Chapter 6, academics are particularly
prone to constructing nouns from other parts of speech, especially verbs,
in order to describe processes; linguists sometimes refer to these types of
nouns as ‘nominalizations’ (Biber, 1988; Biber, Conrad and Reppen,
1998).
If newspapers were driven to create their noun-filled phrases out of a
desire to save space, then we might wonder whether academics were
motivated by a desire for clarity. As we have seen, the defenders of
academic jargon typically claim that academics have to create their own
terms because normal words are insufficiently precise. Given that
many technical terms are strings of nouns, it might be thought that a
phrase such as ‘noun saturation point’ offers the sort of precision that
might be lost if prepositions intruded between the nouns. Douglas
Biber, however, argues persuasively that the opposite is the case. When
academics string together nouns, they do not specify the relationship
between those nouns. Although a variety of different relationships
may be possible, academic writers will assume that their readers know
what relationship they intend to convey. The phrases, however, are
intrinsically less clear than they would be if they contained the preposi-
tions and this indicates that the complexity of academic writing is not
necessarily produced by a desire to state meaning precisely (Biber and
Gray, 2010).
Let us consider the terms ‘infant perception’ and ‘object perception’,
both of which are common to psychologists. Both terms consist of the
noun ‘perception’ being modified by another noun with no linking prep-
osition. Despite their similarity, these two phrases express different rela-
tionships between their two nouns. ‘Object perception’ refers to the
perception of objects, whereas ‘infant perception’ refers to perception by
infants, although grammatically it could refer to the perception of infants.
Psychologists know this but this knowledge is not derived from the intrin-
sic meaning of their terminology but from their general knowledge of
psychology. Sometimes matters can be unclear. Amongst social psychol-
ogists the term ‘group stereotype’ can refer to stereotypes of groups, or
stereotypes held by groups, or stereotypes of groups by groups. Often
social psychologists do not clarify exactly what they mean when they use
the concept. In Chapter 8, I will suggest that social psychologists routinely
use their technical terminology in less than clear ways, for it spares them
the trouble (and even embarrassment) of being precise. Social
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88 Learn to Write Badly
page of a book about political language which they are editing: ‘It can
be said, in a nutshell, that critical scholarship (whether under the label
of CL, SFL or CDA), provides PL/APD with important insights’
(Okulska and Cap, 2010, p. 4). Early into the book, initials are being
mobilized to set the agenda. The first three acronyms stand for
approaches to linguistics: Critical Linguistics, Systemic Functional
Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The second pair of
acronyms (PL and APD) stands for a topic (Political Language) and for
an approach to a topic (the Analysis of Political Discourse). In a footnote,
the authors justify using ‘APD’ in preference to ‘PDA’, in order to
avoid confusion with the entirely different ‘PDA’ of ‘positive
discourse analysis’ (p. 3n). It is as if the authors are organizing their
academic landscape into familiar acronyms, thereby taming a potentially
wild territory.
Of course, no one has the copyright on an academic label. Two different
camps may claim the label ‘PDA’ but neither could establish a legal
ownership, just as academics cannot impose their preferred meaning on
a technical concept which is being used in different ways. Often the
existence of two identical, but different, acronyms signals that there are
two separate academic communities with virtually no overlap between
them. TRPs, as mentioned above, are to be found in the research of those
who analyse the details of spoken talk, using Conversation Analysis or CA.
This CA differs from the CA of those who conduct the quantitative
Content Analysis of media content. Each group is likely to refer to ‘CA’,
as if theirs is the only CA in the whole world.
Amongst the acronyms, which the editors of the volume about political
language mention, is ‘CDA’. For specialists in the study of language,
‘CDA’ means ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (which I will be discussing
further in Chapter 6). Such is the vastness of the modern academic world
that there are many other CDAs. To illustrate this, I checked the titles of
articles in academic journals within a two-month period in late 2010 to see
what other CDAs there might be. In a social policy journal, there was an
article about CDA, or Child Development Accounts; an electronics spe-
cialist wrote about correlated double amplification (CDA) as a technique
for amplifying low voltages; there was an article about CDA 510, a
particular phosphate bronze, and another about CDA, or Clinical
Document Architecture, for exchanging medical information; a dental
specialist wrote about CDA or Children’s Dental Anxiety. Psychiatrists
were using this same acronym to refer to anti-psychotropic drugs or
Conventional Depot Antipsychotics. A CDA gene featured in the title of
another publication; and a medical specialist reported that he had com-
piled a CDA, or Combined Damage Assessment index, for measuring
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Jargon, nouns and acronyms 89
vascular damage. And, yes, there was one article – just one – that referred
to CDA as critical discourse analysis.
It is humbling to realize how many other academics are utterly unaware
of one’s own taken-for-granted acronyms, but that is not really the point.
All these authors were using ‘CDA’ in the titles of their articles, where the
use of the acronym could not have been seriously saving space. Moreover,
all these CDAs stand for noun phrases; there were no verbal clauses. They
refer to ‘things’, albeit very different sorts of things. The articles in the
natural sciences tend to refer to physical things, such as a phosphate, a
gene or a drug. There are also topics (children’s dental anxiety), research
techniques (amplifying voltages, sharing documents, indices for measur-
ing damage), approaches (analysing discourse critically) and so on. By
and large, these were ‘things’ that the authors were promoting in some
sense: a technique, an approach, an index, a topic. There were no ‘baddy’
CDAs in these titles – no acronymized things (or approaches or techni-
ques) that an article was seeking to overcome, refute or get rid of (not even
children’s dental anxiety, which was being promoted as an important
topic to study).
Using an acronym provides solidity to the ‘thing’ that the academic is
writing about, especially if that thing is an approach. Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL), Critical Discourse Analysis and CHAT, through their
initials, appear as approaches, which are solidly established. A sole pro-
fessor, who has failed to attract recruits, does not need to acronymize the
creations of their own making. But the existence of a capitalized acronym
announces that the world is taking seriously an approach or topic to such
an extent that they need to shorten its official name. So, the acronym bears
witness to its own success – to the need for people to shorten something
that is familiar to them.
An official-sounding, nouny label, such as ‘Children’s Dental Anxiety’,
can imply a more thing-like, established topic than the phrase ‘children
being anxious about dentists’, just as ‘patient behaviour’ sounds more
official than the behaviour of a patient. A further step is taken when such a
title is compressed into initials: it suggests that a sufficient mass of others
recognize the status of Children’s Dental Anxiety as a proper topic for
research. Similarly, acronyms for research tools (such as the ‘CDA’ for the
Combined Damage Assessment index) aid in presenting the instrument
as being recognized, authenticated and semi-official. Widespread aca-
demic success need not have actually been achieved, for authors can
confer the status of an acronym upon the entities that they themselves
have created. In so doing, they will be conveying that this thing is so
important that it needs to be an acronym, with its capitalized components
standing above rows of lower case letters. An abbreviation does not need
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