Jargon

A jargon is a type of slang which is used in conjunction with a specific activity, e.g. medical jargon.

The social purposes of jargon are threefold: communication, inclusion and exclusion. The first goal of any jargon is to facilitate communicating information, often by the invention of shorthand terms or the use of technical terms that may be obscure to most people but useful to people who use them on a daily basis. However, while jargon may be born in and mainly refer to a specific activity or profession, activities which have jargon often also are to a certain extent a subculture and thus a jargon can also be a type of slang. Therefore, it serves as a means of inclusion and exclusion : someone who speaks a group's jargon is identified as a fellow member, while someone who does not understand the same jargon is marked as an outsider.

Jargon is used for instance in sports, where technical sportsman terms but also sport-related metaphors for other events in life are used by sports fans for the aforementioned purposes. For obvious reasons, jargon is used a lot in technical professions, see Technical terminology. The rise of information technology and the Internet created many overlapping jargons used by nerds, geeks and hackers to communicate, the very proper usage of these words being a major prerequisite for inclusion in these groups, see Jargon file.

See also Jargon compliance, lingo, pidgin, Wiktionary: Jargon and for examples:

• Jargon code
• Chinook jargon
• Mathematical jargon
• Computer jargon
• Poker jargon
• List of lumberjack jargon
• List of baseball jargon

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