Can We Stop Pretending That Anybody Talks This Way?

Jargon is the closely guarded project of any profession working to form its own bubble — a club of the credentialed where only Realtors conversant with escalation clauses or contracting officers fluent in RFPs or human-resources personnel clutching the latest 14-letter acronym for conflict resolution gain admission.

This practice, I am sad to report, has escaped the professional fields. Capricious, anarchic, yet unrelentingly demanding, a network of actors is determined to construct a far more consequential bubble — not for podiatrists or chemical engineers or custody lawyers but for the culture at large. The project is not satisfied with merely creating terminology; it must sand down and render featureless the terminology that came before.