Art & Creativity Quote by Jean Rostand

A scientist calling reality “jargon” is a sly provocation: it flips the usual complaint that science is cold, opaque, and overly technical. Rostand’s point is that reality is already dense, coded, and stubbornly uninterpretable. The lab doesn’t invent complexity; it translates it. If you want honesty, he suggests, you take the awkward vocabulary that reality demands, not the elegant sentences that culture rewards.

The jab at “books” isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-comfort. Books can be brilliant, but they’re also where humans launder uncertainty into narrative: clean arcs, clear motives, satisfying morals. In science, those are temptations. A bad experiment can be dressed up with a good story; a fragile hypothesis can masquerade as truth once it’s printed, footnoted, and repeated. Rostand, writing in a century that watched propaganda, ideological manifestos, and pseudo-scientific certainties metastasize, treats the page as a technology of persuasion as much as knowledge.

The subtext is a defense of method over rhetoric. “Honest jargon” implies a willingness to sound unattractive in exchange for accuracy: probabilities, error bars, conditional claims, ugly names for messy phenomena. It also carries a moral edge. To prefer reality’s clunky language is to refuse the social contract that asks us to be compelling first and correct later. In that sense, Rostand isn’t praising obscurity; he’s warning that fluency can be a form of lying.