S6E7: Jargon isn’t meant to be an obstacle

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Tuesday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway.

And today, I just wanted to a reminder that if you have crash landed in language world and you have no idea what anyone is saying, even though it seems like they are all speaking your language, don’t let it discourage you.

Whenever we start a new job, a new hobby, a new field of study, we enter a whole new world of words. As native speakers of a language, it can be easy to think we speak the whole language, until we find ourselves marooned on one of these new language islands, of medical terminology, of steps in a dance, of actions in programming. And as an outsider, we don’t understand any of it. And sometimes, even the words we’ve seen a million times in other parts of our life, mean something completely different here.

For some of us, our first, subconscious, knee-jerk reactions are of anger.

Why are these gatekeepers putting all these roadblocks in the way for no reason? How are we supposed to just get on with learning the thing if everyone says things in so many complicated words? Wouldn’t it be so much more efficient to just put everything in everyday language? It feels inefficient, like it’s asking us to double our workload, first to decode the thing, then to learn the thing. It feels exclusive, like it’s leaving us out or calling us stupid until we’ve been initiated into the Cult of the Polyglot.

Someone once said on a podcast I was listening to, I wish I could remember because it’s stayed with me and I think about it a lot, he said that maybe one of the reasons that some people get so angry and so volatile in the face of comedians they don’t like is because, it’s not just a matter of personal taste, of, this guy just isn’t funny to me, but it’s a feeling of rejection that this guy is talking and everyone is laughing but you. It’s a feeling of being on the outside and looking in.

And maybe that’s part of the problem with jargon too.

Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, brought forward the idea of language games, or the idea that meanings of words are intrinsically tied to the actions, groups and situations that use them, he said in his Philosophical Investigations  “Don’t ask me for the meaning, ask me for the use”.

In short, his argument was that when someone uses a word, people in the same language game as them will understand it in relevance to that game: the word Queen to a chess player would be treated as a completely separate entity to Queen in a Freddie Mercury concert or a British coronation party. We as members of each community learn the conventions of the language games we play in. Equally, meanings are situational. Even in the same language community, context is everything so we know what actions to take. “Water” might be an exclamation when a leak springs up, and we jump to fix it. The same single word “water” constitutes a request from the dehydrated man, so we will seek out water and provide it. With no context, the meaning of the word water doesn’t tell us what to do.

So we cannot, he says, separate the speaking of a language from the context, surroundings and activity that it’s being used in… or understanding the “form of life” that the word was used in. Describing meanings of language, then, is actually about human patterns of behaviour.

And that means, for us, that entering into any new community means entering a new language game. We’re entering into a new sliver of reality and we now need to learn how these people have agreed on how to use these words.

But it’s not just a thing that springs up to blockade the outsiders from coming in. It’s not just obstacles that people are tossing into the path of the beginners.

No.

Words spring up, they’re either invented, or everyday words are customised, because they offer a shorthand to what people in that community need to express. That word came into existence in this group to solve a problem: a problem of describing something, instructing someone, or differentiating two things.

With every new word, we get a clue about what that community felt was important enough to designate or customise a word for. When you come up against a new word, so much of the time, it’s telling you, you should pay attention to this. In this community, this word *means* something. There’s a word for this because people in this community care about this, or people in this community do this a lot. When there had to be a specialist or technical word brought in, it’s like a neon sign over the concept saying “this concept was deemed KEY to the pattern of activities, actions, interactions of this community”. They use it enough to need a shorthand, or it’s specific enough to something that matters that the general word in everyday usage by the masses, just won’t do.

It doesn’t mean you need all the terminology, all at once. Because within each language game is more language games. Sport is one language game. Each individual sport is separate language game. Individual skills within that sport are language games of their own. Every time you break something big down into something smaller, a new language game emerges to cover its specificities. So while learning Spanish is one language game, and that’s hugely daunting, inside that language game, learning past tenses in Spanish is also a language game. So focus on that little language game first.

There’s something quite exciting about seeing every natural language in the world as just one massive family of language games.

I know it’s frustrating to be new, and to feel lost, but bit by bit, you will feel more at home here. But don’t be discouraged by the technical language. It’s not meant to be an obstacle. It’s meant to be a tool, and once you learn to use it, it’ll open so many doors to new conversations you can have and new questions you can ask about your language.

Have a wonderful day, keep exploring your language with curiosity, and I will see you tomorrow.