A technical language should never be developed when the words of ordinary language will do. If a theory produces its own peculiar vocabulary, this is only justified if the new terms are attended by new meanings and concepts, or if they clarify matters that are left obscure by the available stock of words. Thus, if the role played by a new term can be performed by a word already in circulation, critics are justified in dismissing the new vocabulary as “jargon.”

When the term “deconstruction,” for example, is taken as a verb and used as the equivalent of “to criticize,” or “to analyze,” or even simply “to discuss,” critics may rightly claim that the verbal innovation only repeats familiar ideas under the guise of novelty (“Isn't deconstruction really just close reading?”). In the case of psychoanalysis, wary readers sometimes maintain, in a more suspicious mode, that the new terms disguise an objectionable doctrine by making it seem more palatable (as when the term “phallus” is said to present itself as merely a “signifier”