And for the reverse, overuse of jargon by a newer academic worker is a sure sign of insecurity. These are people that will break if you ask a couple challenging questions. The jargon is a shield. Unfortunately, academia creates the environment where people feel the need to do that, where they cannot be vulnerable and learn because everything is an evaluation of your worth for the “next step”, where 20 people compete for the same job and everyone else leaves the field.

Similarly, you can use jargon to make a document unassailable. Not just because it is difficult to parse, but because (1} you can always pivot around your meanings when challenged, and (2) you can embed your work in social goods and therefore characterize disagreement as a social ill of some kind. Declare your work to not just be full of jargon, but also, say, an essentially feminist work, and you can write the absolute silliest things while counting on the absolute support of around 30% of your audience, depending on the field. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, as you now also depend on the cowardice of closeted misogynists and the inefficacy of loud misogynists. To be clear, feminism itself is not a problem, it is a very good thing, but academics quickly learn they can construct unassailable works detached from intellectual merit not just by using jargon to obfuscate, but by embedding it in social contexts that inherently challenge critics. In reactionary audience contexts they do the same thing, equating communism with “bad”, praising “fecundity” in white supremacist contexts, getting weird about IQ, etc.