In Praise of Northern Jargon

(The github repository for these notes is here.)

I'm not using the word jargon in a pejorative sense. I simply mean the technical, specialized words used in a given subject.

My whole life, I've had to deal with technical subjects (math, science, and computer programming). And I've often been frustrated with the jargon used in those subjects. There seems to be a bias that pushes people toward jargon that's unnecessarily high-falutin' and intellectual, instead of plain and down to earth. I find that high-falutin' tone to be enormously aggravating. It's a stumbling block to learning and to communicating ideas.

Let me give you an example. Every time I see the expression necessary and sufficient condition, I want to bang my head against a wall. The expression if and only if is what I prefer, because it's the way I learned the concept when I was learning to speak as a child. To my mind, there's no simpler way of expressing it.

Here's another example, taken from computer programming. In the 1970s, papers were written about a beneficial part of designing computer programs, called information hiding. This is just a fancy-pants way of saying keeping secrets. For whatever reason, this jargon became widely used in the field.

Now why is that? Why did the author invent the term information hiding, instead of just using keeping secrets? I assert that it's for cultural or sociological reasons. The author just wants to imitate other people, to be part of a long intellectual tradition which, for whatever reason, favours high-falutin' words over plain words. Perhaps this can be traced back to the cultural and scientific habits of the Renaissance, in which ideas were often communicated in Latin and Greek. But to the English mind, words that come from these southern (Latin and Greek) roots generally seem to have a heavier, more intellectual character than words which come from northern (Germanic) roots.

Technical authors are intellectuals; shouldn't they be using intellectual language? No, not if they want to be as plain and simple as possible.

I'm asserting this: If the jargon used for technical terms in mathematics and science was taken more from northern (Germanic) roots instead of from southern (Latin and Greek) roots, then those subjects would be plainer and easier to learn. They would also be accessible to more people, and at a younger age.

The Roots of English Words

Northern:

Southern:

The etymologies let you trace back the history of a given word. Two examples from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

• the word root comes from the north, and goes back to Scandinavian: OE, ON, Scand.
• the word source comes from the south, and goes back to Latin: ME, OF, L

In the great majority of cases, an English word can be traced back to either a northern root or a southern root.

Northern Words Are Plainer Than Southern Words

As a general rule, northern words tend to have a simpler, plainer feel to them. It seems that the core of the language, the words that we first learn as children, tend to be the northern words. Northern words are often shorter too.

Words having a Greek or Latin root tend to have a heavyweight, ponderous, and high-falutin' feel to them. They also tend to be longer.

Northern words:

Southern words:

For comparison, here's a list of roughly synonymous words having northern and southern roots:

I assert that in the great majority of cases, when such synonyms exist, it's the northern word that we learn first, and it is the northern word which is plainer.

Replacing Southern Jargon With Northern Jargon

Take naive set theory as an example:

• bag [set]
• bags have/contain things [sets contain items/elements/members]
• the empty bag [the empty set or null set]
• two bags are the same [two sets are equal]
• bag A is in bag B [subsets]
• the sum of two bags [union]
• the overlap between two bags [intersection]
• no overlap [disjoint]
• the difference of two bags, one relative to the other [relative complement/set-theoretic difference]
• an input-output machine taking things from a bag as input, and producing things from a bag as output [a map/function]
• a 2-in-1-out machine [a binary operation]

It's interesting that the language can sometimes effortlessly correct mistakes. An example is the idea of equality.

3 + 4 = 7

When I learned this concept, it was implied that two different things happen to be the same. But that's not correct. The two sides of the equal sign are simply two different names for the exact same thing. That's a different idea.

In most contexts, the equals sign means two names for the same thing.