The term "jargon" refers to an informal collection of words and phrases used by folks operating within a specific field or sub-culture.
So people who like a particular band might adhere to certain folkways and perform niche rituals to show their insider, in-the-know status, while also using made-up words or existing terms in an unusual way to demonstrate the same.
Over time, this jumble of terminology can aggregate into a small dictionary's-worth of exclusive-ish language that serves as shorthand for those who understand it.
This can be convenient for intra-cultural exchange, but less so when communication between groups working from distinct cultural dictionaries is necessary.
"Legalese" is a term sometimes applied to the often convoluted, ultra-specific yet somehow also vague language used in contracts and other forms of legally binding (or intended to be legally binding) paperwork.
When you sign a contract to perform some kind of work for a client or click a button saying "I Agree" before doing business with Amazon or Apple, you're probably affixing your (real or implied) signature to a chunk of legalese intended to ensure the other party is on firm legal ground should anything untoward or illegal or inconvenient (for them, usually) occur.
Such contracts are ostensibly structured the way they are to cover as many potential outcomes as possible, which can lead to comically long documents that are borderline unintelligible to non-legal professionals.
New research suggests, however, that many of these documents are not inaccessible because of their abundance of legal-world terminology, but rather because they're just not written very well.
This study assessed around 10 million words of legalese and found that this linguistic-jumble contained a stunningly high percentage of low-frequency words (the sort that could be easily replaced by more common versions of the same), center-embedded clauses (phrases inserted inside other phrases), passive-voice usage (which can make determining cause and effect tricky), and non-standard capitalization (which is difficult to parse if you're not familiar with the topics being addressed or the tone of the person who wrote what you're reading).
In short, this study suggests it's possible to make many of our legal documents more understandable by the everyday person, but because those writing them have a stilted, jarring, cumbersome approach to the written language, these documents are artificially incomprehensible.
It's not the reader who's failing, then, but the writer.
And though sometimes these documents seem to be intentionally fluffed-up to increase their perceptual importance and legitimacy, it's also possible that more writing practice and grammatical education for those working in legal (and other) professions would go a long way to solving some of these communication (and consequently, legal) issues.
Paid Brain Lenses subscribers receive twice as many essays and podcast episodes each week. They also fund the existence and availability of all the free stuff.
You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.
You can also support all my work (and receive gobs of bonus content) via Understandary.