I’m writing this in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, and I’m wondering if I’d even heard the phrase “flatten the curve” before Covid-19 spread across the globe. Almost overnight, politicians, scientists, newscasters and journalists started using this phrase regularly, and we all caught on quickly. It means we need to stop the spread of the virus, but it’s more easily understood through the image of a graph — the line trending higher day after day, the plateau, or the “flattening,” then the longed-for descent, creating a visual curve.
As of this writing we haven’t flattened the curve yet, but we all know what it means and why it’s important. It’s jargon that, until a few weeks ago, was specific to scientists, mathematicians, and other specialists whose profession it is to parse data.
Think about your own work or hobbies. What words and phrases do you know that most people don’t? As a writer and editor, I’m familiar with poetic words like enjambment, free verse, assonance, and couplets. Literary theory uses jargon that includes Bildungsroman, metonymy, and objective correlative. I know these words because they provide a shorthand for discussung literature with my peers. It’s more efficient to use them. We can be more precise.
Write a poem that uses a word or phrase of jargon. Use something from your own work or hobbies, or perhaps you’re familiar with jargon from a field outside your own. Look up a brand new word and see what happens. Or take a word you already know and redefine it. See what happens the the idea of ‘meaning’ when you investigate the sound and use of a word.
