Jargon & Dialogue

Fun end-of-year article in today’s LA Times called “Word of the Year” citing a list of “hackneyed” words that members of the American Dialect Society (did you know such a group exists?) claim were overused in 2008. The list includes:

From Wall Street to Main Street

Bailout

Staycation

Czar

Recessionista

Getting a haircut

No Child . . .

Blagojevich

Pivot

Game-changer

Change

Phelpsian

Value add

Drill down

I bring up this list in part because I love words and I’m fascinated by linguistic trends. But more important, jargon is something we can use with our characters’ dialogue as they can provide color, help to differentiate one character from another, even contribute to a character’s air of authenticity. A great example of that is the opening voiceover in The Apartment:

A DESK COMPUTER

A man's hand is punching out a series of figures on the
keyboard.

BUD (V.O.)
On November first, 1959, the
population of New York City was
8,042,783. if you laid all these
people end to end, figuring an
average height of five feet six and
a half inches, they would reach
from Times Square to the outskirts
of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts
like this because I work for an
insurance company --

THE INSURANCE BUILDING - A WET, FALL DAY

It's a big mother, covering a square block in lower
Manhattan, all glass and aluminum, jutting into the leaden
sky.

BUD (V.O.)
-- Consolidated Life of New York.
We are one of the top five companies
in the country -- last year we
wrote nine-point-three billion
dollars worth of policies. Our
home office has 31,259 employees --
which is more than the entire
population of Natchez, Mississippi,
of Gallup, New Mexico.

INT. NINETEENTH FLOOR

Acres of gray steel desk, gray steel filing cabinets, and
steel-gray faces under indirect light. One wall is lined
with glass-enclosed cubicles for the supervisory personnel.
It is all very neat, antiseptic, impersonal. The only human
tough is supplied by a bank of IBM machines, clacking away
cheerfully in the background.

BUD (V.O.)
I work on the nineteenth floor --
Ordinary Policy Department -
Premium Accounting Division -
Section W -- desk number 861.
DESK 861

Like every other desk, it has a small name plate attached to
the side. This one reads C.C. BAXTER.

BUD (V.O.)
My name is C.C. Baxter - C. for
Calvin, C. for Clifford -- however,
most people call me Bud. I've been
with Consolidated Life for three
years and ten months. I started in
the branch office in Cincinnati,
then transferred to New York. My
take-home pay is $94.70 a week, and
there are the usual fringe benefits.

BAXTER is about thirty, serious, hard-working, unobtrusive.
He wears a Brooks Brothers type suit, which he bought
somewhere on Seventh Avenue, upstairs. There is a stack of
perforated premium cards in front of him, and he is totaling
them on the computing machine. He looks off.

ELECTRIC WALL CLOCK

It shows 5:19. With a click, the minute hand jumps to 5:20,
and a piercing bell goes off.

BUD (V.O.)
The hours in our department are
8:50 to 5:20 --

FULL SHOT - OFFICE

Instantly all work stops. Papers are being put away,
typewriters and computing machines are covered, and everybody
starts clearing out. Within ten seconds, the place is
empty -- except for Bud Baxter, still bent over his work,
marooned in a sea of abandoned desks.

BUD (V.O.)
-- they're staggered by floors, so
that sixteen elevators can handle
the 31,259 employees without a
serious traffic jam. As for
myself, I very often stay on at the
office and work for an extra hour
or two -- especially when the
weather is bad. It's not that I'm
overly ambitious -- it's just a way
of killing time, until it's all
right for me to go home.
You see, I have this little problem
with my apartment --

DISSOLVE TO:

“Wrote business… home office… branch office… take-home pay… fringe benefits.” Each of these bits of business jargon help to establish Bud’s character and validate who he is: a seemingly insignificant pawn in an enormous corporation.

So the next time you have a scene where one of your characters is a real corporate type, consider tossing in a “drill down” or a “value add” piece of jargon.

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