Partial communication

Press, 22 September 1980, Page 14

Partial communication

F 1 Radio

Heath Lees

Last Wednesday, a twominute snippet of a news item on 3ZB featured an Australian. researcher on the phone from Sydney telling us that every activity carries jts own jargon. To demonstrate this we heard a few unintelligible sentences of Australian racecourse jargon and then we were supplied with the translation which, thanks to the telephone, was equally unintelligible. No doubt 3ZB had in mind a leavening of the lump of news; and besides, it was a change from Willie Nelson singing “Blue Skies,” or, alternatively, “Georgia.” On the face of it, there seemed nothing ' new. A printer knows what is meant by Times New Roman; the use of the term “bridge” conjures up,different images to a violinist, a dentist, an engiiieer, or a card-player. Some of the classic puns have been made from professional jargon, like Chico Marx telling a legally-mind-ed Harpo not to worry about the sanity clause because "everyone knows there ain’t no Sanity Clause.” But one example I did catch was that every husband and wife have their own jargon. At a stroke our worthy researcher had moved th 6 notion of jargon

out of the realm of officialdom, away from trades and professions, into ordinary daily life. In short, any. specially shared form of communication in language is jargon. (Why we ..needed to phone Sydney tb find this out escapes me: linguists have been advancing similar ideas for some years). Everyone knows the kind of jargon that officials use when they’ pretend to have no . common bond with the people addressed. The best example was once maliciously attributed to British Rail: “If the unit operative (train driver) engages visual contact with a contrary line indicator (sees a red light) then the procedure outlined in the preceding paragraph should be put into operation (he should stop).”

Radio announcers use jargon almost like liturgy. The most frequent formula is ‘.‘but first . . .” qnd they

overdo the annoying habit of

a record “bringing us up to” a time check or some other momentous event 3YA rarely alters its tea-time slogan of “That’s the news, sport, and weiather” — you can almost see them being ticked off the list — “and now ‘Checkpoint’.” . George “Let’s start at the beginning’* Balani is one of the many who cannot shake Off the word “situation”; and 3ZM announcers have actually been known to condone the phrase “at this point in time.” Perhaps we could just invent the word atpit to cover that one, the way- American journalists gleefully produced an acrostic for Nelson Rockefeller’s “Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God” (BOMFOG).-

.Part of to-day’s jargon seems to cancel out yesterday’s jargon. The first. New Zealand Ombudsman, Sir Guy Powles, was interviewed on last week’s “Insight ’80” and. took pains to see that his use of language did not give offence. He described the office of Ombudsman as. “there to help the small man” adding hastily “or small woman” inadvertently laying himself open to a deluge of complaints from the Big Persons’ League. Incidentally, why did no-one say Ombudsperson on that

programme? Is it unpronouncable?

The last thing I remember my Australian researcher saying was that most disagreements occur when people don’t understand the jargon, i.e. they don’t fully share the attitudes implied by the words used. The phone-in programme is an ideal showcase for this type of partial communication. During an argument the beleaguered host has often to rephrase what the last caller said, simply to try to illustrate the attitudes that he/she assumed. Many debates seem to get nowhere because people don’t share the common outlook that will make mutual sense of “big" words like culture or religion. Recently, with ■ the morality of the Springboks’ tour much in the- air, it seems as though ,we have difficulty, in reaching even a reasonable consensus over the words “politics” and “sport.” Perhaps the Rugby Union officials could also have considered these words before publishing their “defence” of the invitation.

: All in all, it was a stimulating though minute item From now on I’m going to avoid jargon like the plague. You see? I’m sticking to cliches.