While we're on the subject, I just happen to have written a humor
article on academic jargon. I hope the formatting comes through okay. The
magazine that was going to publish it has since folded, so I have not found
much use for it. Hope you all enjoy it. You may recognize some
suspiciously-Twainian sounding phrases:
Steve Brykman
Surviving the sesquipedalian post-colonial hegemony polemic
or
How to succeed in graduate school without even trying
Congratulations on your decision to continue with your academic
career! To succeed in graduate school, be sure to have handy, at all times,
the following three things:
1) A brain. Not a good brain, necessarily, just any brain. Studies have
shown that very few anencephalics have ever made it to the graduate school
level, and that many that did had difficulty maintaining a grade point
average above the required 3.0.
2) A pen. A pen may be cheaply and easily purchased from your local
drugstore. Be forwarned: You are going to have to write something at some
point in your graduate career, and when that time comes, you'll be glad you
read my article.
3) A bigger dictionary. Get ready, folks. I don't care if you've got the
entire Oxford English memorized. When you get to graduate school, you are
going to hear words you never, ever heard before. For example, recent
polling has shown that 95% of U.S. grad. students regard death not as an
end to life but as an "undeniably problematic post-colonial hegemonic
defamiliarization with life."
You see, the whole point of graduate school is to take things that
are, under normal circumstances, fun and interesting things (e.g. novels,
rock&roll, cartoons) and to talk about them using words few people can
understand and even fewer can spell. Words that are so hip they aren't even
in the dictionary. In short, words like:
Word: Hipness rating: Sounds like:
Re-member **** What doctors did for John Wayne Bobbit
Hegemony ****** What happens when you don't clip
your bushes.
(Also famed for being the only word that
rhymes with "by jiminy")
Depoliticize **** If Santa moved
Deconstruction ****** Church leader whose ancestors were
cursed with an unfortunate last name
Problematic ******* New vaccum cleaner: The Problematic
2000©
Materialist *** The type of girl Madonna is
Formalistic *** Black tie mandatory
Antiessentialist **** Someone opposed to food, water,
shelter
Positionality ** Football Term
Defamiliarize *** Rhymes with Cecil B. Demilliarize
Postcolonialism *** 18th century breakfast cereal
Epistemological ** New sect of protestantism
Teleological *** The school you go to to become an
epistemological preacher - teleology
school.
Metacritical * Word used on the show ER
The problem with these words is that they look convincingly as if
meaning can be deciphered out of them. But then when you actually try to
figure out what the word means, you're stumped - because these are words
designed by people who, as they were writing their book, couldn't think of
the right word, so they just made up one of their own. See, what the people
who invent words like these do is they take a perfectly good word and then
they keep tacking on prefixes and suffixes until you couldn't dig out that
original word with a pickaxe.
Want to sound smart? Want to confuse people and make them feel bad
about themselves? Now you can! Just by following eight simple steps!
It's Steve's Do-it-Yourself Sesquipedalian Word Generator!!
step 1: Pick a prefix from column a
step 2: Match it with a word from column b (or use your own word!).
step 3: Tack on a suffix from column c.
step 4: Stick a hyphen anywhere in the word. (optional)
step 5: Capitalize either the first letter in the word or the first letter
after the hyphen.
step 6: Add the word "New" for extra obfuscatory power! (optional)
step 6: Give your word a meaning that has nothing to do with any part of
your word.
step 7: Sprinkle your new word througout your Ph.D. thesis.
step 8: Pat yourself on the back for contributing a new word to the English
Language!
Column a Column b Column c
De karaoke iticize
Re lambada iliarize
Post fabio atic
Anti nipple ity
Multi bouffant ification
Meta curmudgeon istic
Logo donut icism
Dia hematite ages
Neo fissiparous ologies
Syn glebe s
Hetero ipecac itude
Homo percolate ical
Para spackle ative
In tomentose ian
Inter pinochle alist
sarsparilla ization
marcarena ogocentricism
age
able
Who cares if nobody knows what you're talking about? Just think of how
smart you'll sound!
The time has come to abandon our dictatorial dictionaries and
proclaim, once and for all, the right of the individual to create and
define his/her own words. For what is a word but a mere aggregation of
phonemes? And who is to say what any particular set of phonemes is intended
to mean? Who gives the folks at Oxford or at Random House the authority to
lay claim over our human, God-given abilities to aspirate or produce
bilabial fricatives? A word should mean whatever the writer would like it
to mean, or whatever the reader thinks it means.The important thing is that
the reader choose a definition for that word that makes him/her (with all
his/her various multi-ethnic positionalities) feel comfortable and
unthreatened. When I look at a word, I might think of a completely
different meaning for it than the one intended by Mr. Webster, but does
that make my interpretation any less valid? I should think not.
But I digress. The funny thing about all this is the people who use
these disconcertingly long and pretentious words are the same folks who
criticize rap music for its dope, fly lyrics. So remember, the next time
someone tries to tell you dis and phat aren't good English words, you just
remind them that defamiliarize and antiessentialist aren't in the
dictionary*, either.
*Random House Webster's College Edition, at least