In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand adve...rtising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a certain jargon, which, in French, I should call un Persiflage d'Affaires, that a foreign Minister ought to be perfectly... master of, and may be used very advantageously at great entertainments, in mixed companies, and in all occasions where he must speak, and should say nothing. Well turned and well spoken, it seems to mean something, though in truth it means nothing. It is a kind of political badinage, which prevents or removes a thousand difficulties, to which a foreign Minister is exposed in mixed conversations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The town is divided into various groups, which form so many little states, each with its own laws and customs, its jargon and its ...jokes. While the association holds and the fashion lasts, they admit nothing well said or well done except by one of themselves, and they are incapable of appeciating anything from another source, to the point of despising those who are not initiated into their mysteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. C...riticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profun...dity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, an...d easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and ...every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a lang...uage that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »