Crimes Against Language

[HershOstropoler]

"We can see a socio-sexual parallel between the geography of the wilderness and the topographies of narrative in this genre, which organizes a particular spatial itinerary and social anatomy."

Is there, anywhere, a reader brave or foolish enough to explain what that means?

Well, I'd translate it as:

"Her tale of the wilderness could be a tale of the perils of love, in the way one feels and goes through life."

But ok, it loses in the translation.

[Az]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
The thing is, several of the terms used can, in the the correct context, be exceedingly meaningful. In the bit quoted from Empire, which lies closest to my own field of knowledge, every term used is usefully distinct- "identity" etc. are part of the sociologist vocabulary and entire books have been written on each single term. Sure, it's easy enough to explain each concept in a few words, but when you're writing for professionals there's absolutely no need. I suspect each of these sentences are part of a wider text explaining each part carefully too, so I wouldn't judge them before I've read the entire relevant paragraph.

That doesn't defend the sloppy construction of the sentences, nor the general pseudy pretension some of them radiate, but I personally believe that complex language does have a point and a place in writing.

(Also, although I'm uncertain of the quality of these examples, sometimes truly groundbreaking texts can be enveloped in utterly incomprehensible babble. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by many considered the most important work of 20th-century philosophy, is written in a way not even other philosophers understand and makes sense only when explained in a Wittgensteinian tradition. Wittgenstein, being a bit of a bastard, quite intentionally wrote it this way to stop the riff-raff trying to interpret his work.)

did you just say riff-raff?

[Giant_Squid]

Me use small words! Me good! Me no like when use big words!

"In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate."

So how would you want to express something like that? "When one country takes over another country, and then some people are thinking about it, then when they try to think about it as separate and then at the same time try to prevent themselves from thinking of it as different and the same at the same time, which they do sometimes, then that turns out, which is kind of weird when you think about it, to be at the same time something considered important aside from anything else as well as something considered as very close and connected to the people trying to think about it" That's the best paraphrase I can come up with, and it's twice as long and three times as incomprehensible. But anyone who understands the words can tell that there is in fact a basic idea the first sentence is trying to communicate and which it communicates effectively, and that if there's a quicker and easier way to communicate it, it would take someone much smarter than either I or the original author to do.

Language exists to communicate ideas. If there's an idea that a first-grader couldn't understand, chances are you can't express it in language that a first-grader could understand. If there's an extremely complex idea, then it's probably best expressed in extremely complex language. It's not like these professors are taking the sentence "The dog went to the park" and expressing it as "A canine quadruped ambulated towards the urban recreational facility". You can't use the word "thingy" for "conceptualization" without a loss in meaning. Does that make it difficult for an uneducated person to understand the theories of decolonialism? Maybe. That's another good reason to be educated.

Look at this guy writing his little article. He uses the term "polysyllabic" to refer to this long words he doesn't like. Well now, he could have just used "long". "Polysyllabic"'s got five syllables, Greek derivation, and is incomprehensible to someone with less than a tenth grade or so education. "Long" has none of these disadvantages. Why does he use it, then? Because it expresses his point in a clearer sense, and because his target audience is one that knows enough to be able to read college-level writing. Well, if I'm a decolonialism theorist person, I'm going to want to express my point as clearly as possible, and my target audience is going to be one that knows what decolonialism is. Similarly, this writer makes up a new term (or copies it from John Leo, who proly made it up in a similar article) - "po-mo babble". This addition of a new term is the creation of a jargon restricted to people complaining about too much jargon - a four syllable term with a limited audience base when he could have just said "long words". But he wanted to be clear and to coin a term which exactly described what he was talking about. He's just not willing to let others do the same thing.

Also interesting is the contrast between science and the humanities he puts up. He's not just attacking the humanities' use of big words - I get the feeling he's mostly attacking their very existence as a real discipline. He says he has no problem with quantum physicists using long terms - apparently he doesn't mind using something like "radioactivity" rather than "little invisible ray thingies that kill you" - because he recognizes that radioactivity is something that exists and so you've got to have a word for it or things get kinda awkward. But he denies that "non-construction" exists, or that academics have the right to name it and avoid some sort of awkwardness like "a state where you're not constructing stuff". If he doesn't believe in the existence or importance of "non-construction", that's fine, but in that case his problem is people making up concepts, not people using big words.

If I had to pick a problem with academic writing, it would be enforced rigidity and lifelessness. No using first or second person, no digressions, no use of tones whatsoever - just an effort to guarantee a complete separation between the idea and anything human in the mind of whoever's writing or reading about it, which of course means that person's deluding themselves. For example, in a lab report, instead of writing in the experiment history "I tested the DNA" (which I did), it's got to be "The DNA was tested by the experimenter."

[st_swithin]

Programmers call it 'obfuscation'.

It's like writing comments is to programming as using a turn signal in your car is everywhere in the US except for Los Angeles.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed

(Also, although I'm uncertain of the quality of these examples, sometimes truly groundbreaking texts can be enveloped in utterly incomprehensible babble. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by many considered the most important work of 20th-century philosophy, is written in a way not even other philosophers understand and makes sense only when explained in a Wittgensteinian tradition. Wittgenstein, being a bit of a bastard, quite intentionally wrote it this way to stop the riff-raff trying to interpret his work.)

In the TLP Wittgenstein manages to say more than every other philosopher for the previous 300 years.

Perhaps you are the victim of a bad translation.

I've never read anything which is as beautifully transparent as..

1. The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.2. The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case and also what is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts

It gets harder later on, but if you've done enough formal logic it makes sense.

[DAVOUT]

Giant_Squid,

Pleased to be, for once, in agreement with you on this one. I think that we are irritated mainly because what you describe rightfully as a necessity for an accurate communication of ideas is too often wrongly interpreted as a style and snobishly applied to trivial messages.

[st_swithin]

Agathon, you honour me by quoting me at my most eloquent, and I daresay, befitting best.

BTW I have those principles in equation form, if you'd like.

[Buck Birdseed]

Agathon, don't mix up simplicity with transparency. A longer work may not have the same beauty, may often be more superficial and certainly doesn't make you pay attention as much, but it will certainly be easier to approach- if Wittgenstein had gone through the trouble of carefully explaining each point to the layman in a work of three times the length, it would still retain the content while being paedagogically much more smart. It would lack that Wittgensteinian flair, I suppose, but philosophers should spend as much time spreading their views as actually concieving of them. Philosophy isn't art!

I much prefer the approach of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper- Write out your ideas in full in an almost textbook way, use literary analogies, funny anecdotes, examples, answer your critics, go through the trouble of explaining everything. It makes the reading experience so much more pleasant.

[Evil Knevil]

I write rather densely sometimes. I used to be told to stop being pretentious and was called a plaguariser. Got my politics report (at Uni) downgraded because "It sounded plagurised". I said "prove it"

Dammit, thats just the way I am/ If I wasn't then why would I say I am?

[Sarxis]

Humanities was, is and always shall be a joke.

[St Leo]

Anti-intellectualism in the National Post. Why am I not surprised?:P

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Agathon
In the TLP Wittgenstein manages to say more than every other philosopher for the previous 300 years.

Hegel was better, and Marx was better than he.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Hegel was better, and Marx was better than he.

I'd have to disagree on that one. Hegel operated with a primitive logic which was outstripped by the work of Frege, Russell and ultimately Wittgenstein.

But don't be sad. Wittgenstein completely rejected his early theory under the influence of Marxists.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
Agathon, don't mix up simplicity with transparency. A longer work may not have the same beauty, may often be more superficial and certainly doesn't make you pay attention as much, but it will certainly be easier to approach- if Wittgenstein had gone through the trouble of carefully explaining each point to the layman in a work of three times the length, it would still retain the content while being paedagogically much more smart. It would lack that Wittgensteinian flair, I suppose, but philosophers should spend as much time spreading their views as actually concieving of them. Philosophy isn't art!

But he painstakingly defines all his concepts in the Tractatus. Admittedly, it's a long time since I read it cover to cover, but it is far more accessible than the Investigations.

I much prefer the approach of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper- Write out your ideas in full in an almost textbook way, use literary analogies, funny anecdotes, examples, answer your critics, go through the trouble of explaining everything. It makes the reading experience so much more pleasant.

If you want clarity I don't think you could do better than Hume; but for art Plato has no peer.

[molly bloom]

Refer yourselves to George Orwell's 'Inside the Whale and Other Essays', specifically 'Politics and the English Language' (although the adulteration and obfuscation of language is not the sole purview of Anglophone literati ).

He says: It is easier- even quicker, once you have the habit- to say: 'In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption' than to say 'I think'.

As he made clear in '1984', bad writing offends not just against our ears and eyes and perception of ideas and the way they are communicated, but is frequently used to lie, to shadow what is being said with a curtain of respectability- so the killing of civilians becomes 'collateral damage' as if somehow, funds for a mortgage or to purchase a car had been dealt a grievous blow by a laser guided bomb.

As he says, and American and British and French academicians could profit from the enacting of this advice:

'What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about'.

'Jesus wept' has rather more staying power than 'salt tracks bedabbled the visage of the Lamb of God'.