Essay argues that jargon unmoored from hands-on practice loses meaning silently, with psychology and politics as the clearest failure cases.
Key Takeaways
Jargons tied to physical consequence (rock climbing, sailing, weaving) resist semantic decay; abstract domains like psychology allow meaning to drift unnoticed.
The DSM is the central example: each clinical community develops its own local meanings while believing the terms are universal and precise.
Christopher Alexander’s fireplace example shows how specialization severs a word from lived use, degrading it without anyone changing the word itself.
“Semantic deconversion” (loss of faith in words) afflicts Heidegger, Korzybski, Wittgenstein, Garfinkel; each responded by inventing new jargon, compounding the problem.
Political abstraction is the most dangerous form: the essay ties lexical mutation (e.g. “kulak”) to historical atrocities, not as metaphor but as mechanism.
Hacker News Comment Review
No substantive HN discussion yet; the single comment riffs on the word “surfeiting” with a Sean Penn meme, loosely echoing the article’s thesis that words corrode without maintenance.
Notable Comments
@smitty1e: “Words, like code, corrode in the absence of maintenance” – sharp one-liner that maps the essay’s core claim onto software.
