Academically powerful words
While Geoff
and Eric
are listing the words they find most distasteful in titles --
"revisited", "redux", and "whither" for Geoff, "status", "nature", and
"role"/"rôle" for Eric, though Eric promises more to come -- Stanford Daily columnist Katie
Taylor has been cataloguing the "catchwords of the literati" in a
1/17/07 humor piece. Taylor thoughtfully provides a Top Ten list
of words that you can wield to better your academic life. There's
no overlap (yet) with Geoff's and Eric's lists.
Taylor uses stereotypes about discourse markers to set things up:
Valley girls insert "like" into the
holes of their oral communication. Teenagers include "you know"
into [AMZ: "into" probably persevering from "insert into"] many of their
dialogues. Stanford students, however, fill the gaps of their
in-class comments with "juxtaposition."
On to some quantitative claims:
Although "juxtaposition" is far and
away the most frequently-heard word in fuzzy lectures, discussion
sections and all other professor-student interactions, it is just one
of the Top 10 Catchwords of the Literati. The repeated usage of
these chosen terms by the upper echelons of intelligentsia transforms
them into, essentially, the "you knows" of the tenured
track. To sound smart, you need not learn hundreds of GRE words,
or switch your internet homepage to wordaday.com. In fact, all
that is required to impress your peers, professors and oftentimes even
yourself is to master the Top 10 list.
Written in increasing order of frequency, the Top Ten Catchwords of the
Literati are as follows:
10) Iconoclasm
9) Ubiquitous
8) Paradoxically
7) Subjective/objective
6) Duality
5) Feminist
4) Ironic
3) Dichotomy
2) Race/ethnicity
1) Juxtaposition
... a solid understanding of these 10 words guarantees any student an
opportunity to climb up the vocabulary-slinging, multi-syllabic
word-dropping, intellectual ladder. In fact, every title of every
book that every Stanford professor has ever published contains one of
these words. Additionally, the statistics further demonstrate
that every A paper includes on average six words from the Top 10 list,
while the average B paper contains merely three to four.
(You might have wondered about those fuzzy lectures and so on.
This is not a reference to furriness or to fuzzy logic or woolly
thinking. Here on The Farm there's a distinction between fuzzy
subjects, students, jobs, etc. and techie -- sometimes "techy" --
ones. It's, roughly, humanities, arts, and the social sciences
vs. the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. We take
these things seriously here. Why, a while back our Anthropology
department split into a fuzzier department, Cultural and Social
Anthropology, and a techier one, Anthropological Sciences.)
Some of these words people have been criticizing for decades;
"dichotomy" and "ubiquitous", in particular, are often seen as words
for pseuds (people "with pretensions to cultural or intellectual
sophistication", as Wordspy
puts it).
Somewhat surprisingly, not one of the ten, even these two or
"juxtaposition", is in Robert Hartwell Fiske's
Dimwit's Dictionary, a collection
of 5,000 words Fiske deems to be "overused".
Though it's probably a mistake to take Taylor's list even
semi-seriously, I note that two of the ten -- "race/ethnicity" and
"feminist" -- are there because of the topics of some of the classes
Taylor is reporting on, rather than because of the vocabulary people
use in talking about intellectual matters. Any of the following
might have gotten on the list for this reason: "gender",
"heteronormativity", "homophobia", "misogyny", "racism", "sexuality",
"social class", "stereotype".
Two more of the items -- "paradoxically" and "ironic" -- are often
targets for criticism because they are frequently used loosely,
expressing mere surprise on the speaker's or writer's part, rather than
actual paradox or irony.
And then there are other words that could have been contenders, for
instance: "antithesis", "bifurcate", "conflate", "counterpose",
"prolegomenon", "reiterate", "synthesis". You can probably think
of some others to juxtapose to these.
[Addendum: Martyn Cornell has managed to jam all ten words into a single sentence: "Paradoxically, the ubiquitous juxtaposition of an ironic feminist subjective/objective dichotomy alongside the duality of race/ethnicity is not iconoclasm." It sort of flirts with meaning at several points, without actually achieving meaningfulness. He is hoping for an A+ for this submission, but I told him that Katie Taylor is doing the grading on this one.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 19, 2007 09:48 AM