3 Review(s)

Part essay, part discursive dictionary, this is a sharp and funny account of gobbledegook we find everywhere in our culture - in holiday brochures, menus, sports commentaries, not to mention academia. Jargon, Walter Nash shows, is a multi-coloured swap shop: financiers talk like field marshalls, educationists like stockbrokers, politicians like athletes, fast food vendors like romantic novelists. He explores the varieties of language coloured by shop-talk, vogue words, "buzz words", slang, hackneyed phraseology and hard pressed metaphors; the origins of jargon in literary, journalistic, commercial and technical settings; and changes in usage and attitudes to usage over time. He also incorporates a selective and sometimes satirical 'devil's dictionary of jargon today.