Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses
Condition: SECONDHAND
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Part essay, part discursive dictionary, this is a sharp and funny account of gobbledegook we find everywhere in our culture - in holiday brochures, menus, sports commentaries, not to mention academia. Jargon, Walter Nash shows, is a multi-coloured swap shop: financiers talk like field marshalls, educationists like stockbrokers, politicians like athletes, fast food vendors like romantic novelists. He explores the varieties of language coloured by shop-talk, vogue words, "buzz words", slang, hackneyed phraseology and hard pressed metaphors; the origins of jargon in literary, journalistic, commercial and technical settings; and changes in useage and attitudes to useage over time. He also incorporates a selective and sometimes satirical 'devil's dictionary of jargon today.
Author: Walter Nash
Format: Hardback, 224 pages, 152mm x 229mm, 468 g
Published: 1993, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, United Kingdom
Genre: Linguistics
Part essay, part discursive dictionary, this is a sharp and funny account of gobbledegook we find everywhere in our culture - in holiday brochures, menus, sports commentaries, not to mention academia. Jargon, Walter Nash shows, is a multi-coloured swap shop: financiers talk like field marshalls, educationists like stockbrokers, politicians like athletes, fast food vendors like romantic novelists. He explores the varieties of language coloured by shop-talk, vogue words, "buzz words", slang, hackneyed phraseology and hard pressed metaphors; the origins of jargon in literary, journalistic, commercial and technical settings; and changes in useage and attitudes to useage over time. He also incorporates a selective and sometimes satirical 'devil's dictionary of jargon today.