“Jargon acts not only to euphemize, but to license, setting insiders against outsiders…”

Professional jargon—on Wall Street, in humanities departments, in government offices—can be a fence raised to keep out the uninitiated and permit those within it to persist in the belief that what they do is too hard, too complex, to be questioned. Jargon acts not only to euphemize, but to license, setting insiders against outsiders and giving the flimsiest notions a scientific aura.

George Packer, “Can You Keep A Secret?”, The New Yorker (7 March 2016), 67.