Publisher's Synopsis
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 useage and attitudes to useage over time. He also incorporates a selective and sometimes satirical ′devil′s dictionary of jargon today.
