jar·gon

(jär′gən)

1. The specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, especially when viewed as difficult to understand by outsiders: a crime novel that uses a lot of police jargon.

2. Nonsensical or incoherent language: "Your description will be considered as mere jargon by every man of sense" (Alexander Hamilton).

3. A hybrid language or dialect; a pidgin. Not in technical use.

intr.v. jar·goned, jar·gon·ing, jar·gons

To speak in or use jargon.

[Middle English jargoun, from Old French jargon, probably of imitative origin.]

jar′gon·ist, jar′gon·eer′ n.

jar′gon·is′tic adj.

jar′gon·y adj.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

jargonist

Rare. a person who makes use of a jargon in his speech.

See also: Language

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References in periodicals archive

While the script takes a deep-dive plunge into the jargonist nerdery of the space-time continuum, the Nolan brothers--Christopher again working with Jonathan on the script--show an artful hand at illustrative imagery, finding figurative ways (the pearl in the oyster!) to communicate the wilder notions of wormholes, black holes, horizon lines, light-bending, particle physics, five-dimensional space beings, relativity, and so on.

Christopher Nolan

Although obscured by occasional jargonist excesses, especially in its opening chapters, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth presents a cogent and imaginative social reading of Mom's Utopia and the intersection of carnavelesque and utopian ideas and practices with Mores and other Renaissance texts.

Christopher Kendrick. Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England

Robert Bisset, Douglas; or The Highlander, 4 vols (London, 1800) asserts that if the 'metaphysical jargonist' had 'instead of spinning of theories from his own imagination, accurately examined facts, studied history and human nature', he would 'have found out the falsity of [his] own systems' (III, 34-35).

Novel and History in Anti-Jacobin Satire

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