Jargon

Damn, am I really updating so infrequently that I’ve had one post since the last TKT? Well, it’s midterms, so what can I say? I will admit that I have taken some time out recently for a new club that just started up on campus, and that’s one reason I have had less time to post, but it’s also a great reason to put up a new TKT. I just joined the “Knit Wits” club that had its first meeting yesterday and will meet every Wednesday to swap patterns, yarn, stories and techniques. It was during the meeting that an idea was “cast on” for today’s TKT: jargon.

What is jargon? Well, it has lots of definitions, but the one useful to today’s TKT is the following: “the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group” (Langenscheidt’s New College Merriam-Webster 1996). Essentially, every occupation and hobby has its own jargon. What makes jargon stand out from everyday language is that it takes common words and narrows down their meaning for a special purpose, giving them a completely new denotation and/or connotation (See TKT #6 for more on these two words.), and jargon often creates new words as well which are not used by the larger population.

Several jargons have become so popularlized that they even have their own names. Legalese is a form of very specialized jargon where words take on new, very specific meanings based on their use in the court of law because they must be clear and standardized on the definition of everything, including the word is. A thieves’ cant was language used as a form of code between other thieves where the use of one word really meant another so they could speak undetected by the law. Other jargons exist but aren’t often recognized as such. Businesses, the sciences, and the government all have their own jargons, often using abbreviations, initials or acronyms to create new words such as “memo,” an abbreviation of memorandum or “laser” which comes from “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” Essentially, if you can think of an occupation, game, or hobby, there’s a jargon to go with it.

Jargon outside of the group in which it arose is often unintelligible and confusing. After all, many (if not most) of the words whose definitions are altered never make it to the mainstream, and words which are brand new may never make it out of the group depending on how specialized the term is. After all, a jargon is made to fit for the particular context in which it arose. So if an office on 5th Street has a machine that stamps the back of photographs with a smiley face that they call the “whoppy-toppy,” the term isn’t really going to apply to many other machines out there. Sometimes a jargon can be used to keep people out (e.g. the thieves’ cant), so its users don’t want it to reach mainstream appeal. In a case such as this, the jargon keeps changing so that outsiders can’t keep up and catch on. Most jargons, however, aren’t for exclusion as much as inclusion, so over time and given the right circumstances, their words and definitions can get out and become used by the larger population, therefore adding to the overall knowledge of that field by many more.

Knitting, being a very far-reaching and very old craft, has its own jargon. And with the advent of the Internet and other wide-spread forms of communication, the jargon of knitting as a whole can spread all over rather than exist in isolated communities as it would have been before. Perviously, knitting would probably have had many jargons, each unique to the knitters of individual communities (though this probably still exists in certain areas). Nowadays, knitters from all over can learn new terms and techniques and can spread their own words and knowledge to others very easily.

Some of the jargon I picked up while at the meeting had to do with stitching techniques as well as yarn and patterns. Felting, for example, is when you use 100% natural fibers (wool is the preference) and you knit something very, very large. Then you wash it in hot water repeatedly until it shrinks down so much that it becomes solid. This is a term that you can find in your dictionary. It is widespread enough and an old enough technique (Mongols used it to fashion armor, for example.) that it has entered the larger vocabulary of the English language. This is an example of a jargon term that made it big.

The next two terms, however, have not. They remain rooted in knitters’ vocabularies and not all knitters are even aware of them because they aren’t completely widespread all over. To frog is to undo an entire knitted piece or a very large section of it. You’ve seen this in old cartoons where there’s a bit of string hanging off of someone’s sweater, so one person grabs it while the other walks away and the entire sweater becomes undone one line at a time. The other term is to tink (derived from the word knit backwards) where rather than frog an entire section, you knit backwards, undoing one stitch at a time in order to fix a mistake recently made. Both are great examples of jargon in use because while the experienced knitters understood what was being said when these terms were used, I sure didn’t (being new to knitting, after all) and was confused until they were explained to me.

Jargons are everywhere, and you probably know more than you think. Just consider the jargon used at the workplace, at schools, for games (including on-line, role-playing, sports, and even kids games), in all academic areas, and for all the hobbies you’re involved in. More than likely, each has its own jargon–its own specialized vocabulary–that sets it apart and aids communication for those in the group. Jargons help the insiders communicate quicker and more efficiently with less loss of understanding and less chance for ambiguity. So the next time you’re at work, playing a game, or even just watching a movie, you might catch on to the fact that a lot of the language being used is specialized to a group and therefore a jargon. It’s like being in lots of secret clubs, all united just by vocabulary! Neat, huh?