Catchwords of the Literati

[intertext]

Via Oook Blog comes this reference to an article by Stanford Daily columnist Katie Taylor about the 10 most (over)used words in academic circles.

The Top Ten in reverse order of popularity 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

Kind of makes you proud, doesn't it?

What I want to know is - where is "paradigm"? What happened to "privileged"? "post-colonial"? or surely "politics"?

Those terms are, I hesitate to say, ubiquitous in the journals I read, and I find it ironic that, in a discussion of the duality between the feminist and post-colonial aspects of race and the subjective and even iconoclastic interpretations of the discourse that paradoxically arises from that juxtaposition and the dichotomy between the relatively privileged language on one side of the binary and what occurs when we deconstruct the other, we ultimately have any readers with the energy or patience to care about language or the study of literature at all.

Comments

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm droppping 'dichotomy' and 'paradoxically.' Considering my subjects, I can hardly lose 'feminist'...

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I find it ironic that... we ultimately have any readers with the energy or patience to care about language or the study of literature at all.

I thought the purpose of academic writing (at least in the inhumanities) was to repel the lay reader lest they challenge the value and relevance of what was being written thus upsetting the cozy taxpayer funded, self perpetuating oligarchy.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Trangressive?

[gillo]

:::Runs away, clutching head and screaming::

You've been redaing a certain historian's journal, haven't you?

Gawd that sort of language is depressing.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Well, thank goodness I can still use 'analog'! And 'heuristic' and 'hermaneutic' didn't make it? or 'discourse'?

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I have to look it up every time I see it!

[methodius.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was going to ask about paradigm too, and what about holistic? And nuanced?

[lilyfriend.livejournal.com]

Juxtapose drives me nuts. Can't get through a class without hearing it a couple dozen times.

And that reminded me of a word my one prof was using every other sentence one class: conculcating.

I looked it up, and it means to trample underfoot according to this dictionary. I don't think he was asking us what Dickens was trampling under the Victorians. Am I maybe remembering the word wrong? Is there something else that sounds like that? Or is he just getting his word of the day wrong?