Jargon in writing is usually discussed as a problem of clarity — the writer uses terms the reader doesn’t know, and communication fails. This is a real problem, but it is not the most interesting one. The more interesting problem is what jargon does to the writer.

George Orwell observed that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. The second direction of that corruption — language corrupting thought — is what jargon, at its worst, achieves. A writer who reaches habitually for specialist terms, corporate vocabulary, or the fashionable abstractions of their field is not simply making a choice about words. They are making a choice about thinking. And the choice that jargon makes, over and over, is to stop the thinking before it is finished.

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