On Shoptalk: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s At the Strangers’ Gate (2018)
“There is no greater pleasure in a working life than being inducted into a new kind of shoptalk, with the ooze of expertise cheaply earned in a few afternoons of listening. Nowadays my family mocks me for the Broadway-ese I have lapped up hanging around actors and directors: we ‘track’ a narrative thread to make sure it ‘lands’; we wonder if we should ‘put a button’ on something—i.e., create a sharp crescendo to provoke applause. In that period, I felt the same way about the tawdry shoptalk of fashion magazine copyediting. I was high on it, intoxicated with gutters and widows—with ‘spreads’ that bled (i.e., went right over the spine of the magazine) and spreads that didn’t; and drop caps that might or might not be italicized. I knew that only an outsider called a magazine anything except ‘the book.’ Despite what now seems to me an almost insane narrowness, at the time it seemed far more thrilling than anything I was learning in art history.
For the truth is that academia, though long on technical-sounding jargon, has no actual shoptalk, aside from the desultory gossip of sabbaticals and tenure-track positions and the like, which I had grown up overhearing. But shoptalk isn’t gossip. Shoptalk is secret technical language. It is the argot of shared practice. It is inviting, inasmuch as it inducts the new speaker into a charmed circle of initiates; off-putting, inasmuch as it prevents the new speaker from wondering just how charmed the circle really is.
At graduate school, new names for old things were constantly being generated—‘deconstructed’ for ‘explained,’ or ‘praxis’ for ‘what he did.’ Intellectuals believe that making up new names for things is the same as having new thoughts; professionals are taught the professional names for things in the belief that this will make having new thoughts unnecessary. Louis XIV discovered that having competitions for meaningless medals and geegaws among aristocrats kept them from starting rebellions. It took capitalism to discover that teaching people a specialized professionalized vocabulary helps keep them from asking what the profession is for. The point of the talk is to keep you from thinking too much about the shop. It worked, for me.”—Adam Gopnik, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York (2018)
