Cleaning Up Our Language: A Rant For Academia

      This blog has, among others, the desire to expunge from academic language some of those words which are held cleft to the hearts of the intellectually vapid. Some of these words, not all of them bad or meaningless in themselves, should be removed from the vocabularies until the purveyors of such words can use them carefully and precisely, if even such usages are possible:

         discourse (Is there anything more idiotic than hearing poetry described as 'discourse'?)
         diaspora
         multicultural
         patriarchal (the word is not synonymous with 'hegemonic')
         matriarchal (the word is not synonymous with 'nurturing')
         hegemonic
         neo-Conservative
         neo-Liberal
         ideology
         collage (and mosaic)
         marginalization
         gendered (see also transgendering, regendering, and general gender studies)
         'cultural studies'
         womyn (and womynization, and its equally ponderous cognates)
         fetishization (why is every trope these days considered a fetish of some form or another?)
         'framing the gaze' and other such proliferant optic terms
         gyno-criticism
         phallocentrism (uggidy ugh ugh ugh)
         'constructed identities'
         'decentered identities'
         colonization and de-colonization
         tropological (not necessarily a word to discard, but as is...)
         theory (again, not necessarily to discard, but...)
         'shifting cultural forces'
         dialectic and 'dialectical interplay'
         historicism (and New Historicism, which is really just modified Marxism)
         interiority and exteriority
         deconstruction
         'rethinking the canon' and 'canonical'
         'historical power structures'
         efficacious
         homogenization
         alterity
         racism (see also misogyny, anti-Semitism, and the entire ilk)
         modernity (and postmodernity)
         positioning and positionality
         remonstrance
         Barthesian, Foucauldian, Derridean (basically any adjective referring to a theorist you only think you understand)
         interdisciplinary
         cosmological
         epistemological
         Judaeo-Christian
         hermeneutics
         paradigm
         syntagm
         strategem
         'semantic spaces'
         anthropomorphism
         contextualization and recontextualization
         'impact' as a verb
         textual indeterminacy
         unwriting
         fictionalization
         allegorization
         delineation
         Queer Theory (as if 'sexual identity' could proffer such simple categorizations and simplifications)
         propaganda
         ritualization
         'semiotics of difference'
         semiotics (not worthless in itself, but in its general application)
         representation

Oh, there are so many.... and I'm certainly leaving out far more than I'm including here. And even the words I've invoked here shouldn't necessarily be thrown into the trash bin of verbal history. But chances are that when you are reading something that leans heavily on the vocabulary above, or if you're writing something that does so, the words have become crutches, and very often meaningless. That is, bullshite. When you use such words, make sure they're used precisely.

Let us find the right words, let us find the right words.