Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. In its most benign and neutral definition, jargon signifies "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group." More often, however, the jingly word that Chaucer used to describe "the inarticulate utterance of birds" takes…

For the past twenty years or so, the author has been fortunate to write for a fairly broad audience. While he was teaching, or running an educational program, or doing research, he was also composing opinion pieces or commentaries about the work he was doing. This process of writing with part of his attention on the classroom or research site and…