What is jargon?

Essay by mrsaulong March 2003

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What is jargon? Jargon is the specialized or technical language of a trade or profession. Perhaps there are not many people who clearly know when jargon first appeared. However, most people know that since it is used to serve people's needs, jargon has brought many advantages and disadvantages for people who use it in their jobs or their daily lives. In addition, today we can see that jargon is used in many fields in our society. Medical professionals, for example, use a great deal of jargon to explain about the illness to their medical students or their patients. According to Perri Kiass, the author of the essay "She's your basic L.O.L. in N.A.D.", medical jargon can be helpful but also harmful to the medical professional's work. Personally, I completely agree with her views. I believe that there will be gains and losses that results from understanding and using medical jargon.

First, to what extent can medical jargon be helpful to the medical professional's work? The more extreme forms aside, one most important function of medical jargon is to help doctors maintain some distance from their patients. According to Klass's view, she believes that doctors can take away the patient's pains and also reduce the patient's emotional impact by reformulating a patient's pains and problems into a language that the patient does not even speak. For the fact, this linguistic separation helps the doctors to feel more comfortable when they have any conversations with their patients. Moreover, we all know that it does not matter whether people are young or old. Having good health is always important in their lives. Therefore, doctors will hurt their patients' feelings badly if these doctors tell the patients that these patients have got lung cancer. Personally, I believe that a cognitive doctor should...