Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination:
… most of us rarely stop to think about how language works, or how come we succeed in getting our ideas across in words. It all seems to happen naturally. Poets, novelists, speechwriters or the merely curious sometimes confront these questions, but it is a job that often falls to linguists and philosophers of language.
A rose’s beauty is not fathomed in its dissection. (You may quote me.)
After reading something written by academics, I’m almost always either amused (cue eye rolling) or frustrated. Sometimes I enjoy the article, but more often than not, I don’t. Y’see, academics have a way of spoiling simple things, because when they write or talk, they generally write or talk for and to other academics. (Or hapless students who have no choice but to pay attention . . . or at least to pretend.)
In other words, academics might think they’re addressing the average, common reader, but they really aren’t. (I’ve addressed this phenomenon, called academese, before. It’s the language of, by and between university types.) Every craft has its own jargon. Lawyers, pilots, carpenters, doctors, etc., use terms and phrases that are specific to their particular job. That’s okay, until you sashay out of your environment and begin using the same kind of “speak” when addressing outsiders. When one does that, one begins to sound presumptuous and insufferable.
Communicating
In a related vein, I can recall taking a graduate-level course in “Communications”. (The quotation marks are important.) There were only three of us in the class; two students, one professor. The short story here still leaves me scratching my head in wonder. The professor, (I believe he was the chair of the department), was possibly the most incomprehensible person — Irwin Corey had nothing on this guy — I’ve ever encountered, and I spent a good part of my youth hanging out with musicians and hippies. Nearly every sentence was an avalanche of jargon-laced academese, bound by and tightly tethered to some form of Communication-esque blather. The man, a supposed expert in “Communication”, was anything but. Two out of the three warm bodies in the room thought he was the bee’s knees. The third man out was just that. T’was I, and after the second session, I was out.
The point is, if you think you have something to say, say or write it in a way that others will understand, grasp and appreciate. If you say your piece, then realize nobody “got it”, and THEN blame your audience for being too thick to comprehend your amazing pronouncements, (I had one of those professors as well, go figure), well, you’re just a self-impressed gas bag, and life is way too short to entertain your nonsense.
Please, if the goal is to describe the forest, don’t bog me down with a tree by tree depiction.
