The Language Access Project
A Declaration
Jargon, slang, and neologisms shroud American speech and writing in a cloud of strange and unfamiliar expressions. From the legal profession with its tendency to talk in Latin phrases, to sports with its nickel-and-dime phraseology, to the Federal government with its acronyms gone wild, public discourse in our nation too often leaves the average person baffled and frustrated.
America spends more than $300 billion a year in public and private funds on all forms of education, from kindergarten to graduate school. Yet even after this tremendous investment, too often we fail to communicate with each other. The problem is that special vocabularies and vernaculars have risen within our common English language: sometimes as a shorthand to speed communication, sometimes to capture in a new phrase what was never so clearly stated before, yet also sometimes to exclude"outsiders" from knowing what is really being discussed. There are even some misguided professionals who drop obscure terms upon the general public the same way a terrorist uses bombs, to intimidate and to strike fear. Intentional or not, our verbal walls reflect a society segregated in ways we are slow to realize and correct. In our professions we have created tightly knit verbal communities cut off from each other, each with their own traditions and customs, and each with a suspicion of those who don’t speak the special language.
Some suggest that the problem is the vocabulary itself, that there are too many words and expressions. And there is some truth to this. Do we really need to refer to the briefcase that will open the Pandora’s box of nuclear war as the"football"? Why do we need to call the New York Stock Exchange the"Big Board," when"N.Y.S.E." serves the purpose? D
