Jargon and Language: Primer, Climate Science, Instant Messaging and Romance.
I was watching an old episode of @actuallykylekallgren‘s review show Brows Held High, specifically the episode on the 2004 sci-fi film Primer. While I enjoyed the episode, towards the end I ran into a bit of a problem, particularly with how Kyle describes the use of technical jargon in the film. (And don’t worry, I’ve chatted with Kyle about this on twitter. This isn’t a call out...well, it sort of is, but he knows it’s coming and is okay with admitting his earlier stuff has flaws? So anyway.)
Primer is an odd little movie about the creation of a time machine and time travel. One of the notable things about it is that the creator, Shane Carruth, deliberately copied the way that scientists and engineers use shorthand terms and a very specific kind of working slang, and recreated that in the scenes depicting the scientists building the time machine. There is no exposition for the sake of the audience, no companion for the Doctor to turn to and say “Wibbly wobbly timey wimey”...actually, that’s unfair. That takes it in a completely different direction; on a spectrum with technical terminology on one end, technobabble in the middle, “WWTW” is way over on the other side labelled “It’s not actually important, don’t worry about it”.
In the BHH episode, Kyle calls this a badly told story, comparing it directly to Carl Sagan and other popular science personalities like Bill Nye. The problem, the episode indicates, is that the film should have been used as an opportunity to explain the physics of time travel; using science fiction as science fact.
I kind of have two issues with this Actually, I have three issues but one is more tangential, so let’s start with the first two. Firstly, to be honest Primer is a far better depiction of the daily lives of scientific research than almost any other film. We don’t spell out every single concept each time we talk about them; we define it once and generally assume that when talking to people in our field. This is reflected in the sets and designs of the time machine itself; the film is shot in very ordinary surroundings, mainly industrial parks, while the machine itself is a simple grey box and...yeah. Lots of scientific work takes place in areas like that and using equipment like that. I recognised a lot of the hallways in Primer not because I’ve been to those specific places, but because I’ve seen so many places like that where scientific research is carried out. If I wanted to I could probably construct an argument for how this is good for the story Primer is trying to be, the scifi realism it aims for, but that’s not really the point of this essay.
The second point is pretty simple.
This is not actually jargon. It is not a description of the physics of time travel, because as far as I am aware, no one has built a time machine. Time travel, as portrayed in this movie and films like Back to The Future, scientifically is not just not a theory, it hasn’t even clawed it’s way up to being a hypothesis; it is at best speculation about the nature of something that we can’t even say exists (there have been experiments that appear to break causality on the quantum level, but they keep ending up coming out as having only appeared to break causality. At least as far as I know, it’s been a while since I moved from physics to climate science).
The third issue I mentioned is more of an oddity of the episode in the context of the rest of Brows Held High. BHH is a show primarily about movies, and as such it spends a lot of its time looking at cinematic concepts and terminology. I mean heck, the phrase “cinematic language” pops up a lot. While Kyle usually explains these terms, it feels weird to have him complaining about a movie using specialised language, in a show dedicated to exploring particular concepts using specialised language. More specifically, he often examines movies using cinematic language in ways I, an audience member outside the field of film theory, would not understand; references to particular films, techniques I don’t notice till someone points them out to me, ect.
What I’m saying is Kyle both uses jargon on his show, and does not call out the use of jargon in other films, because he is used to using those terms. For him, it is not jargon. It is language. And this is what I want to look at.
Jargon is usually considered to be specific technical terms that only people in a particular field understand. I kind of think this is a useful construct, but I want to widen the definition to look at other kinds of language and other situations that we might call jargon.
Let’s start with some classic jargon.
An isopycnic-coordinate oceanic circulation model formulated with the aim of simulating thermodynamically and mechanically driven flow in realistic basins is presented. Special emphasis is placed on the handling of diabatic surface processes and on thermocline ventilation. The model performance is illustrated by a 30-year spinup run with coarse horizontal resolution (2° mesh) in a domain with North Atlantic topography extending from 10° to 60°N latitude.
This is not something I just wrote myself. It is from the abstract of a scientific paper I have open in another tab. To me, that’s a perfectly understandable paragraph. I don’t have to look anything up (well, okay, I did have to check isopycnic but to be fair there’s a lot of iso’s in climate science) to understand it. To other people, that is a wall of jargon (to be honest I’d be curious as to what non-scientists think it means. It’s surprisingly simple. If people want I can explain it but for now it is left as an exercise for the reader).
I think we can all recognise that as jargon. Everyone okay with defining that as jargon? Okay, good! Now that we have an example of jargon, let’s quickly give a definition of jargon. Jargon, as we are using it here, is a form of specific language used between an in-group that is not understandable by members of an out-group. That’s the most general definition, but usually the in-group is very particular, and usually professional in nature.
What you might not have noticed is that above, in the paragraph where I talk about how Primer can’t describe the theory of time travel because that’s not there in a coherent enough form to be described, is that I was using the words “theory” and “hypothesis” in their technical form. In casual speech, a theory and a hypothesis are basically the same thing. in scientific terminology however, there’s a clear difference. A hypothesis is a prediction of what we expect to observe, and notably even here in this definition I am using jargon because I have left out the word “falsifiable” from in front of the word “hypothesis”. A hypothesis is a prediction with a clear way of shown to be wrong. A theory is a hypothesis that has succeeded in not being falsified enough that we take it as essentially correct (empirical science has no method of absolute proof. At least not philosophically).
So, question. You likely got what I meant up there, even if you don’t know the technical definitions of those words in the way I was using them. But these are technical terms being used in comparison to each other in a short hand. So...could we say that’s jargon?
What is the exact line between language, and jargon? What happens when you have a technical definition that is close enough to how you might construct the same sentence in a casual sense that it can still be understood?
(On a side note, originally I was going to use the terms theory and law here, since colloquially, a law is treated as more important than a theory, but in scientific terms they have different meanings. A law is a generalised statement of observations. A theory provides an explanation for why this occurs. The law of evolution might be “the distribution of alleles in a population varies over time”, while the theory of evolution provides an explanation for why these alleles change and what factors control the change in the distribution...but I couldn’t work a law into the bit above so I went for hypothesis and theory, which have the same meaning in casual language but different specific meanings. Anyways...)
Let’s broaden the discussion a bit more, and bring in a different form of language.
I have a lot of problems understanding body language. I can read facial expressions a bit better, but trying look at body language is like trying to decipher a cryptogram for me. This actually caused quite a lot of trouble for me as a teenager, as I kept misreading people’s body language, particularly my mum’s who has a very idiosyncratic body language. I can now generally read my immediate family, but I’ve known them for over twenty years, and that’s a lot of time to build an individual vocabulary of someone’s quirks, particularly when you live with them. I can’t generalise this knowledge, I can’t read most people’s body language.
This has resulted in me actually finding it far easier to read intention and mood in text than in person. I don’t have the conflicting signals I’m misreading from their body language, just their words, the bit I get, and people’s writing style in causal IM style conversations often changes depending on mood. I might need to see a couple of examples of someone’s texting, but I can generally read someone’s mood pretty accurately from text. It is rarely the words that change, but the grammar and punctuation they use around those words. Someone who usually uses capital letters drops to lower case; something’s wrong. Someone who is usually very loose uses full sentences and punctuation? This is something serious. And so on.
Neither of these forms of meaning are usually deliberate on the part of the person doing the communicating, but a.) they are a form of conveying information and b.) I can understand one, putting me in an in-group, and I cannot understand the other, putting me in an out-group by the definitions above. So then, my next question is can something be jargon, even if the language being used is not deliberate?
Here I run into a weird problem. Instinctively I’d say no, that jargon is a deliberate short hand within groups, and that there’s a difference between not understanding the jargon in a particular field and say, not understand French. There’s a line there, and it might be fuzzy, but if we expand jargon too widely we end up with something useless, or at least indistinguishable from the concept of language in general. But, at the same time...I find it fairly easy to slip this into the definition of jargon. It’s a specific meaning added to the sentence. The fact that it is done with how the sentence is communicated, and not the sentence itself might mean that we put it outside the definition of jargon but should we? I mean English is notorious for requiring emphasis to create meaning (for example the sentence “I never said she stole it” has seven different meanings depending on which word you put the emphasis on), and this has a clear out group and in group; I have shown how I can construct an out group for one and an in group for the other by myself!
So then the next question might be to approach it the other way. Is it useful to class these as jargon, as opposed to simply different languages? I’d say yes, it is fairly useful; saying that body language to me is jargon is a good way to get across the difficulty I have in understanding body language. It’s a useful term, and it fits the definition so I’m actually going to have to say yes. Body language and IM punctuation can both be jargon, and like all jargon you can move from the out group to the in group, and vice versa if you don’t keep up with the evolution of the terminology.
You might say it’s weird that I’m spending this much time defining jargon and trying to work out it’s limits, but I have my reasons outside of sheer academic interest (or; how far can I stretch this mental tool). One is professional; I am interested in communicating science to the public, something that is particularly important for climate science for fairly obvious reasons, and thinking about how to carry out this communication, not just in terms of the vocabulary I am using but the grammar and indeed the punctuation I am using is important. Working out what people will call jargon is really useful there.
Secondly, calling something jargon I think has subtle implications on how it positions you in relation to the people around you. I am aromantic, and to be honest a lot of the way that people discuss romance is, to me, a clear example of jargon. A while back I asked people to define romance, and what made a romantic relationship different from other kinds, and they really struggled. The response I got a lot involved some variation on the phrase “It’s a feeling...you just know”.
The thing is, I’m aromantic. I don’t just know. That feeling being described is a shorthand for something I do not understand. That is jargon.
The thing is, things like body language and romance are expected to be understood in society. By classing them as jargon, a lack of this understanding I think is flipped; it isn’t that people who don’t understand common implications and social language are “abnormal”, but rather that it is a form of jargon they don’t understand. And from politics to science to art to, yes, film theory and describing building a fictional time machine, there is always jargon we don’t understand.
