Jargon & meaning (was dissing & begging)

[John -dot- Cornellier -at- PARIS -dot- IE -dot- PHILIPS -dot- COM]

Guy Ivie wrote "slang terms tend to exclude parts of the audience...".  Well
yes. Quite. Vocabulary is used, consciously or otherwise, to convey meaning
secondary to the literal meaning of the words themselves. Like pronunciation,
vocabulary conveys secondary meaning, e.g. to which social group the speaker
belongs. Groups are defined as much by what they are _not_ as by what they are.
So groups use slang to identify members and, just as importantly, to exclude
others.
E.g. talking about a boat, the choice of statements "she's damaged on the port
side" or "it's damaged on the left side" says as much about the speaker as about
the subject. A third layer of meaning is whether the speaker uses the jargon
intentionally. In the above example the former statement used intentionally
could indicate snobbery or linguistic fastidiousness; used without pretense it
could indicate a life at sea.
The above is a good test of whether or not to use jargon. If the correct use of
the word conveys new meaning, then it is a Good Thing, and the advantage of its
being a more concise way to convey meaning must be weighed against the risk that
some readers check the glossary. Acronyms are a good example of this: they save
time & bandwidth, but may confuse the newbies.

Stephen Victor, commenting on Ernie Tamminga's msg., wrote "Could someone
explain to me how losing the "name" of a thing is to lose the thing itself? Does
calling a table an airplane make it no longer a table?" Well... functionally the
table doesn't change. Its molecular structure doesn't change. A rose smells the
same whatever you call it. Having said that, calling a table an airplane does
make it no longer a table in a linguistic or conceptual sense. The word table
has associations: under the table, table manners, table talk, turning the table,
Table Mountain, etc. So calling a table an airplane doesn't change the physical
object to which it refers, but changes the impression created in the mind of the
reader/listener. So yeah, losing a word could mean that the "thing", i.e. the
word's symbolic value, is lost too.

Wayne Douglass wrote: "And an example of elegant slang is?" Some Cockney Rhyming
Slang is in common usage in England, e.g. in "use your loaf", loaf of bread =
head. In "Have a butcher's", butcher's hook = look. Likewise Dog & Bone = phone.
A British Telecom (phone company) poster ad showed a kitchen table with a place
set for one. Obviously no food had been served and no one had eaten there yet.
On the plate was a hand-written note with the following msg.: "Darling, your
dinner is in the dog". Literally, the message is that Darling should have phoned
to say he or she would be late. But the msg. is reinforced by the resonance of
"phone" in the word "dog". Note also the alliteration. I don't know if this is
elegant slang, but it's slang put to elegant use.

Hope I didn't beg any questions.

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