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STUDENT: If I'm learning a language by conversing in it?
GUMMIDGE: That's the aural-oral method. Say it aloud.
The student does and is completely incomprehensible. A cheer goes up from the faculty.
GUMMIDGE: From now on, you must never speak; you must verbalize.
STUDENT: Must I verbalize Jargon only to my peer group?
GUMMIDGE: Not at all. You can now use it even when addressing preschoolers. In his book Translations from the English, Robert Paul Smith offers these samples: "He shows a real ability in plastic conception." That means he can make a snake out of clay. "He's rather slow in group integration and reacts negatively to aggressive stimulus." He cries easily. And "He does seem to have developed late in large-muscle control." He falls on his head frequently.
STUDENT (awestruck): I'll never be able to do it.
GUMMIDGE: Of course you will. The uninitiated are easily impressed. It's all rather like the ignorant woman who learns that her friend's son has graduated from medical school. "How's your boy?" she asks. The friend clucks sadly: "He's a practicing homosexual." "Wonderful!" cries the first. "Where's his office?" Do I make myself clear?
STUDENT: No, sir,
GUMMIDGE: Fine. Now open your textbook to the David Riesman chapter. Here is the eminent sociologist writing about Jargon: "Phrases such as 'achievement-oriented' or 'need-achievement' were, if I am not mistaken, invented by colleagues and friends of mine, Harry Murray and David C. McClelland ... It has occurred to me that they may be driven by a kind of asceticism precisely because they are poetic men of feeling who . . . have chosen to deal with soft data in a hard way." Now then, my boy, is there any better example of flapdoodle than that?
STUDENT: Well, how about these samples from Harvard Sociologist Talcott Parsons: "Adaptation, goal-attainment, integration and pattern maintenance."
GUMMIDGE: Yes, first rate. Even I practice them, just as Horowitz plays the scales. Try them in a sentence. Two men open a store. Someone provides the cash. What's that?
STUDENT: Adaptation?
GUMMIDGE: And then they entice customers—
STUDENT: Goal-attainment.
GUMMIDGE: They set up a sales staff—
STUDENT: Integration.
GUMMIDGE: And they don't steal from the cash register.
STUDENT: They agree to maintain the wider values of the culture. That's pattern maintenance.
GUMMIDGE: Perfect. See how complicated you can make things? Imagine what damage you can wreak in the schools where a situation is no longer practical, it is viable; where a pupil is no longer unmanageable, but alienated. Get it?
STUDENT: Got it.
GUMMIDGE: Do books have words and pictures?
STUDENT: No, sir, they have verbal symbols and visual representations.
GUMMIDGE: You're on your way. For your final exam, read and commit to memory the 23rd Psalm Jargonized by Alan Simpson, president of Vassar College.