[oblio]

> Ask a non-golf player what is an eagle or ask a physicist, a mathematician and a politic (sic) the meaning of power.

All those fields could do with less jargon. Especially since in many cases there is a common word.

Lawyers especially give me the impression that they use jargon to obscure their field from regular folks.

Our field, being new, should not make the same mistakes, but yet, here we are, where the default "file viewer" on Unix is cat, the pager is called "more", etc.

I don't see any reason why those types could not have had descriptive names from the start. Well, there was one, lack of experience, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thechao]

Dejargonification is great; I agree that jargon is a real barrier to entry. However, after having dealt with lawyers (and doctors of all stripes: MDs, PhDs, ...), I've come to see jargon for what it is: a weakly typed pointer. It's exactly analogous to a struct of function pointers with a user cookie in C.

Jargon lets you summarize whole concepts in one word. A lot of jargon is functional in the math/programming sense: you can pass 'arguments' to the jargon. The jargon adds levels of abstraction that let the users communicate faster, with less error, and higher precision.

For instance, the distinction between civil and criminal matters; or the distinction between malfeasance, misdemeanor, and felony.

[mywittyname]

> Lawyers especially give me the impression that they use jargon to obscure their field from regular folks.

Really? You think that lawyers (and physicians) use Latin/Greek words in order to confuse regular folks?

These fields are very old, and changing the meaning of something Mens Rea or lateral malleolus is going to require A) an exact drop-in replacement which will probably just as obscure, B) retraining of an entire set of people.

Our field is similar in that we have a mountain of jargon that's largely inaccessible to regular folks. The point of those words are not to converse with regular folks but to convey information to others in the field with as little ambiguity as possible.

[tomatocracy]

In England many Latin terms were replaced with English terms in 1998 with the adoption of the new Civil Procedure Rules in an effort to make justice "more accessible" (alongside other reforms). These arguably actually added confusion - for example it's much more obvious that a "writ" is a specialist term versus "claim" which replaced it.