Jargon Monkey
December 8th, 2007 by 
Caroline Spector
The heavens tumble, Darling, and I’m… Eliza . . .
Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
“Show Me” from My Fair Lady, Music by Frederick Loewe, Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.
###
Unlike Eliza Doolittle, I have no problem with words. In fact, I frickin’ adore words. I’m so enamored of words that The Dude calls me a “Jargon Monkey.”
I am not at all offended by this. However, if he started calling me “Monkey Face” like Cary Grant does to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion, I might be less than thrilled. (On the other hand, if he said it using a Cary Grant accent… but I digress.)
What got me started on the whole, “I love words,” thing, was catching a promo for some movie the other day and one of the characters used the word “shenanigans.” I was gob-smacked with delight. (Gob-smacked is another word I like. Okay, maybe it’s more of a phrase, but work with me here, people.)
How often do you hear “shenanigans” used? Not very. But it’s a fantastic word. It rolls off the tongue — rich, full, polysyllabic, completely evocative of what it’s describing. Damn, that’s some fine word there.
Later that same day, I was in the pharmacy waiting for a prescription. At the end of one aisle was an entire end-cap full of “curatives.” “When did y’all start carrying nostrums?” I asked the pharmacist. “What are nostrums?” he replied. I pointed at the end-cap and said, “Palliatives. Potions of questionable efficacy. Nostrums.” He nodded. “Good word.”
I even dig made-up words. I don’t watch The Simpsons anymore, so I didn’t realize that one of my current favorite Internet words came from there: “craptacular.” As in, “Those Christmas lights are craptacular, Homer.”
I even like making up my own words. When someone asked me to tell them what kind of writer Howard Waldrop was, I said he was a fantabulist. What I especially like is that having made that word up, I can spell it however I damn well please. (Words I adore. Spelling them I suck at.)
So that’s general word love, but jargon love? That’s a whole other animal. I love cooking jargon. I love music jargon. I love knitting jargon. I love sewing jargon. I love gaming jargon. I’m of the opinion that it’s virtually impossible to learn certain things with knowing their attendant jargon. (Programming jargon – a real bitch.)
But by far my favorite “jargon” has to be poker jargon (mainly Texas Hold ‘Em.)
God, I love it when I flop the nuts and then some fish chasing an inside straight chases all the way to the river, hits his two-outer, and because I was slow-playing, goes all-in and — ‘cause I’ve got him covered — I knock him out.
I realize that for most of you, I was just saying, “Blah, Blah, Blah, Ginger” but that’s the appeal of jargon. It makes you feel as if you’re an insider. But more than that, it allows you to talk about a certain set of conditions in shorthand.
My poker example above would have sounded like this in non-jargon:
The dealer laid the first three cards on the table. I discovered that my two cards, combined with those three cards, constituted the best hand that could be created. The other player had a hand that could only be improved by two other cards out of the entire deck, and it was highly unlikely those cards would be dealt. Despite having a hand that would be difficult to improve, he foolishly continued playing. I decided not to bet my strong hand aggressively. As a result, when the final card was dealt and the other player got lucky and received one of the two cards needed to improve his hand, I was able to take advantage of his unwise play and relieved him of all his chips.
God, wake me up when it’s over.
Jargon is shorthand. It’s zippy. It gets you where you need to go – right now. It’s the vibrator of words.
Wow, do I love me some jargon.
Posted in Caroline, People, Pop. Culture, The Dude | 
13 Comments »
December 8th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Wicked true! I love jargon when it’s my jargon, and the jargon of my people. I think your poker jargon is, like, the best!
December 8th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
I was on a panel at ‘dilloCon during which we discussed when to use and NOT use jargon in stories. You want to be sure the reader feels included, not baffled. (Walter Tevis was great at pulling off this trick.)
As an example of how to baffle, I asked the panel and the audience, “What would you say if I told you I had a D-28 in drop-D set up for slide?”
And as I expected, artist David Lee Anderson was the only one in the room who was hip to that jive. Because he plays guitar.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
s’funny. I very recently got a big-time crush on the word nomenclature.
December 8th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
I’m running Reaper with about fifty VSTs in the plug-in folder. I usually don’t have to mix more than about 20 tracks on any given project, with maybe a half-dozen being MIDI.
I tend to use minimal effects in the chain when mixing, mostly just a channel strip on some tracks, an ampsim for instruments, maybe a send to ‘verb with a low-level return. It seems that I always end up putting a brickwall limiter set at -0.3 dB on the master fader, though, because I’m extremely paranoid about digital overs during the render.
This used to be exotic jargon, but I bet most of you here understand much of it.
December 8th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
I love this.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:58 am
“Now I know what it’s like to be a dog”
December 9th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Rory, not me.
I know cooking jargon. But everyone knows cooking jargon, even if they don’t necessarily know how to do it at the stove. There’s some esoteric stuff, I use a bain marie when I make a budino and most people can’t quite parse that, but it’s pretty esoteric language even in cooking.
Some of my favorite jargon is figure skating jargon. I don’t particularly care for figure skating, which I think is somewhere between a sport and an entertainment. But inside edge, outside edge, triple Sowkow. A triple Sowkow. How can you not love the sound of that?
December 9th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I’m particularly fond of home-made case-specific jargon. Years ago, when the Spouse and I were doing some construction work around the house, we were doing a good deal of caulking, which led to the creation of the term “hatpin.” As in “Did you hatpin the caulk?” and “Damn, the caulk’s clogged again. Can you do a quick hatpin?”
I have a similar passion for words (and I note that one of Spouse’s more obnoxious nicknames for me is “My Little Talking Book,” crooned in a condescending tone. It’s a wonder that man has any kneecaps left. But I digress). This passion used to get me in trouble when I was a teenager and liked using all my cool words; people thought I was being a show off and would give me terrific shit.
Maureen: as the mother of a figure skater and a person who stood for two hours last night in a freezing cold damned ice rink watching the Holidaze on Ice show to see the little wight do her seven minute synchronized team routine, I am shamed to admit that I recognize the terms but still don’t know what the hell any of them mean. But I did find useful compendium of terms which I offer to you too.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
[...] Jargon Monkey [...]
December 10th, 2007 at 1:30 am
Skating jargon actually has two sub-dialects–ice skating and roller skating. We share the Salchow in common but what a roller skater calls a Mapes an ice skater calls an outer-back toe-loop. I’ve never seen an ice skater do a Boekle but it is a common jump among roller skaters.
Spins have their own vocabulary too. Because of the nature of roller skates the edges involved are much clearer. A roller skate really will really turn in a circle a foot in diameter while an ice skate ends up pivoting on one edge or another. Another interesting point in the nature of the jargon lies in the fact that the jump invented by Ulrich Salchow is denoted by his last name while the jump invented by Axel Paulsen is known by his first name.
for Rory
Patch a keyboard into three VCO’s tuned to unison. Patch the sine output of the first VCO into both inputs of the ring modulator. Patch the output of the ring modulator to a VCA controlled by its own envelope generator. Patch the triangular output of one of the other VCOs through another VCA controlled by an envelope generator and the sawtooth output of the last VCO into a lowpass filter patched into a VCA with independent envelope generators for each. Set the decay of the envelope generator on the filter to a faster rate than the decay of the envelope generator on the VCA. Patch a white noise generator into a resonant filter tuned to one of the harmonics of the VCOs then patch the output into another VCA. The attack and decay should be very short, this is the attack transient of the synthesized sound. Mix the four outputs and tune the respective attack, decay, and release parameters until the sound is fat and good. (Note this takes a modular analog synthesizer. A MiniMoog or an ARP2600 doesn’t have anywhere near the resources needed.) Extra points if you know what a klangumwandler is.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Oh, hell. You’re an old-skool patch-cording hardware synth freak, aren’t you, Stuart? Tragically, I know all of the terms in your post and what they mean.
Except for the klangumwandler, which I will google tomorrow, when I’m smarter than right now.
And I have no bloody idea at all what sort of sounds I’d hear at the output if I did those things. I mostly just run through presets and tweak them until I get a sound that I like.
I don’t know if I own a soft-synth that will do all the things in your recipe, though maybe DiscoDSP’s Discovery might come close. It’s a Nord Lead 2 emu. I doubt that it’s modular enough, though, and I’d probably have to run multiple instantiations, then buss them all together for final mixing.
The instrument that would definitely do what you’re talking about is U-He’s Zebra. I have the free cut-down version, ZebraCM, and the sound is incredible. The full version costs $200, though, and I’m not enough of a synth freak to buy it. Yet.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Porte -ocheres are big in my KC neighborhood (built up between 1890s-1915). There are other delightful terms and states, but probably about 30 percent of the houses have them. Basically a covered driveway bit where you can drive the coach up, drop people off under a roof and then go park the rig).
We also have a house in the neighborhood that has this ginormous garage, They covered on the history segment on our daily NPR local interview show. The person who built the house had one of the first steam cars in KC. They built a hand-crank turntable in their garage, steam cars did not have a reverse gear and it enabled them to get in and out of the garage without too much aggravation.
(we also had one of the first accidents in the country, down at about 12th and Grand, between the only two cars in KC region. Only here…)
(and right now we still have power, but it’s raining and 30 degrees outside…I’m not hopeful.)
December 11th, 2007 at 12:08 am
dammit. Porte-cocheres. cocheres…