Thursday, March 19, 2015

Is there something behind academic verbosity

The vapid, self-indulgent verbosity of the latter-day academia has become proverbial.  Clever jibes from inside the ivory tower like the infamous Postmodernism Generator make a nice exposé of the likes of Homi Bhabha's 90-minute projectile verbal vomit.

However, is there anything more to academic pontification than an elaborate (and often well-funded) exercise in intellectual masturbation. Actually, rather often than not egg-headed boffins do make sense but their wording is so arcane that it does sound like. Let me furnish you with an example.

"The mythopoetical totality of Western hegemonic discourses serves as the epistemological base for the post-colonial legitimation of the Eurocentric world order." In reality, put in plain English, it boils down to "white folks know better so get on with it!" but you can't really say that, can you?

The years of immersion into that kind of jargon make academics incapable of expressing themselves in any other way. As a result, whatever ground-breaking revelations they may have about the world, stays safely within the campus, for the rest of the world can see their lips moving but can't comprehend what they are saying.
 


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