Jargon

A lot of people, I can hardly understand them anymore. And everyone texting all the time, even when you're talking to them. Jargon, in the workplace, springs from necessity: a carpenter needs to call a thing something, a printer, a paper-maker, a secretary. We need names for things so we can refer to them. A mason, for instance, calls an upright brick on edge, a soldier; and upright brick, face out, is a sailor. Across the trades, especially, it can get very thick, a patois, that, as a subset, becomes regional. Calling cues, as a Stage Manager, is a tightly contained language; being the ram-rod for a large concrete pour; installing an exhibit of paintings. English is a wonderful, very rich language, and I find myself trolling through it almost all the time. Most of the notes I make anymore are simple word lists, and I'm sure I spend an hour a day with my reading glasses on, scouring back through several dictionaries, usually trying to find out when a particular word came to mean a particular thing. The easiest way to codify something, is to couch it in a dead language: botany, and to a certain extent, architecture (ogee, plinth, pediment), and I do love having a conversation with Jenny, the Park Service Naturalist, because she drops in the Latin name for a specific plant, not to flaunt her knowledge, but because that is the name of a specific plant. On the other hand is a time I had just given a reading, at the University of Pennsylvania, we were walking outside, a couple of students, my host and myself, having a smoke, I had a flask I passed around, and we were talking about the 'corruption' of language even then. I think I was still using a typewriter. And out of the blue, one of the students, a male, 20 maybe, said:"Man, that reading was the shits." I didn't know what he meant, it sounded like a negative review, but it turned out that it was a compliment. I still don't understand the mechanics of that. He said he had never heard anyone read in such a natural voice, and we talked about that for awhile, whatever the natural voice is, and he wondered how I was able to tap into that. I didn't want to tell him that it often took me eight hours to write a page, a paragraph, hooks and glosses and adumbration. Removing conjunctions, changing periods to commas. This is hard work. To make it feel easy. If you lived in the south, you had an uncle that told stories. The oral tradition comes to bear. Bear, in that usage, for instance, meaning a load carried to a specific point. I'm not concerned with 'bearing' so much as the span of the beams because wood is so good under compression. I make a guess, pi R squared or some calculation, an algorithm, and elect to carry that load with a 6x10 inch Pony Beam, I don't know why it's called that, fucking jargon.