Have you ever attended a meeting where everyone seemed to understand the issue when it began, but after an hour of discussion, nobody could remember what the original question was? Or read a government document that required you to consult three other documents, two websites, and a lawyer just to figure out where to sign?

Congratulations. You’ve been jargogled.

English once had a perfectly good word for the process of turning something relatively straightforward into a bewildering mess. Sadly, the word fell out of use, leaving us without a concise way to describe much of what happens in government offices, corporate boardrooms, and committee meetings.

What Does Jargogle Mean?

The obsolete verb jargogle means “to confuse” or “to jumble.” It describes the act of mixing things up so thoroughly that whatever clarity once existed has departed, presumably in search of a less stressful environment.

It’s a particularly satisfying word because it sounds like what it means. Jargogle. You can practically hear someone’s thoughts being dumped into a blender.

Unlike simply being confused, which may be entirely your own doing, being jargogled suggests that something has actively tangled your understanding. Someone has taken a perfectly reasonable explanation and subjected it to a process from which comprehension is unlikely to emerge alive.

John Locke and the Art of Jargogling

One of the earliest recorded uses of jargogle appeared in 1692, when the English philosopher John Locke employed it in A Third Letter for Toleration.

Locke was engaged in a rather heated intellectual dispute over religious toleration and whether the government should use force to persuade people to embrace particular religious beliefs. His opponent, clergyman Jonas Proast, had advanced arguments that Locke found less than convincing.

Locke warned that “the jumbling of those good and plausible Words in your Head” might “a little jargogle your Thoughts” and send his opponent stumbling around the same argument yet again.

In other words, Locke was telling his opponent that he had become so entangled in his own arguments that he could no longer think clearly. This was the seventeenth-century philosophical equivalent of saying, “You’ve managed to confuse yourself, and you’re now trying to make it everyone else’s problem.”

Considering that the dispute involved religion, government authority, and the interpretation of complicated arguments, jargogle was evidently born for a distinguished career in law and public administration.

A Word the Legal Profession Could Put to Good Use

Nowhere is the need for jargogle more evident than in legal writing. Lawyers have spent centuries developing a specialized vocabulary that permits them to express relatively simple ideas in language that makes ordinary people question whether they’re still reading English.

We’ve previously explored research suggesting that legal contracts are difficult to understand largely because of how they’re written, rather than because their underlying concepts are inherently too complicated for ordinary readers. This was a disturbing discovery for a profession that has traditionally regarded incomprehensibility as evidence of intellectual sophistication.

Consider the ordinary sentence, “You must pay the bill within thirty days.”

A sufficiently determined lawyer could transform that into a paragraph beginning, “Notwithstanding any provision hereinbefore set forth, the party of the second part shall, within a period not exceeding thirty (30) calendar days…”

At some point, the client simply gives up and signs whatever is placed in front of him. The lawyer has successfully jargogled the matter and can now send an invoice explaining the charges in equally impenetrable language.

Government agencies are equally accomplished practitioners. They can turn a simple application into a seventeen-page document containing instructions for completing the instructions, accompanied by a warning that failure to comply with requirements explained in another publication may result in penalties.

And then there are meetings. Nothing demonstrates the power of jargogling quite like a committee that assembles to resolve a minor problem and adjourns three hours later having created four subcommittees, seventeen action items, and a pressing need to schedule another meeting.

It’s Time to Bring Back Jargogle

Like grumbletonian, the centuries-old word for someone who complains about everything, jargogle describes a human activity that has survived remarkably well despite the disappearance of the vocabulary once used to describe it.

In fact, the modern world has made jargogling easier than ever. We have email chains, PowerPoint presentations, automated customer-service systems, and software updates that rearrange everything just when we’ve finally figured out how it works.

Jargogle deserves a second chance. It’s short, wonderfully expressive, and considerably more polite than many of the things people are inclined to say after spending forty-five minutes trying to understand their insurance coverage.

And the next time someone launches into a lengthy explanation that somehow leaves everyone more confused than before, you can politely interrupt and say, “I’m afraid you’re jargogling the issue.”

Of course, they’ll probably ask what that means. You’ll have to explain it, and there’s every possibility that your explanation will leave them even more confused.

Which, when you think about it, would be rather fitting.

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