Academic Jargon Quotes

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

What's a' your jargon o' your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools; If honest nature made you fools.

I hate academic mysteries. As soon as I come across the word 'don' and it's not someone's first name, I close the book.

In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia. They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

[Cost-benefit analysis is used:] ... to produce lofty academic-sounding reasons for endless inaction.

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

You have but to hold forth in cap and gown, and any gibberish becomes learning, all nonsense passes for sense.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

I could never figure out or probably did not take the trouble to figure out what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

Crabbed and obscure definitions are of no use beyond a narrow circle of students, of whom probably every one has a pet one of his own.

Nobody in my family or in my neighborhood used the language that they used at the University of Chicago. I remember the first time I heard the word "value" repeated again and again by my professor. Value to me was the price of a frying pan.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.