Jargon

Randall Monroe, the genius behind the XCKD comic, published a book called Thing Explainer in 2015. The conceit of the thing explainer is that fifty-four topics are discussed using a very limited vocabulary - the one thousand most commonly used words in the English language.

It's a novel concept, and harder than you'd think. One thousand words isn't a lot, and the first hundred most commonly used words in the language are abstract, and therefore useless at describing things - the, be, to, of, and, a, an, and so on. Monroe does allow himself the small cheat of using pictures as well as words - he is a cartoonist, after all - but still. It's very damned difficult to explain something when your vocabulary is so limited.

As such, the explanations vary from the inspired to the genuinely puzzling, making the reader who wants to find out something play a kind Russian roulette, where she will either discover her answer or walk away reeling, more puzzled than she was at the beginning.

This is germane to our general topic of interest here in the matter of technical language, or jargon. To what extent can a writer use jargon in explaining jargon?

It's always heartbreaking to see a jargon term used in the jargon term's documentation. Your correspondent had reason to google the phrase "probability distribution" recently, and came up with the following distressing results:

• A probability distribution is a mathematical function that describes the probability of different possible values of a variable ...
• In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different ...
• A probability distribution is a statistical function that describes all the possible values and probabilities for a random variable within a ...
• The probability distribution for a random variable describes how the probabilities are distributed over the values of the random variable.

Isn't that appalling? If you're attempting to explain a two-word phrase, the two words in the phrase cannot be used in the explanation unless it's utterly impossible to avoid them. Here, all four use "probability", and the fourth-listed uses both "probability" and "distribution", earning the writer a double-donkey award for shocking lack of effort.

For what it's worth, there were two good explanations among the results:

• A probability distribution is a statistical function that describes possible values and likelihoods that a random variable can take within a given range, from Investopedia, and
• A probability distribution is a statistical function that describes the likelihood of obtaining all possible values that a random variable can take, from Jim Frost.

There is no point in repeating jargon if you're trying to explain it. Defining a turbo encabulator as an encabulator that is turbo-charged is no real help to anyone.