Oppobrium? Latifundium? Bellicose? Effete? Really? What the fuck is wrong with these people. These words are like paragraphs apart
Edit: just read the term “professional-cum-technocratic ethos” this shit is not normal and the author should be ashamed
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Damn, TIL from Hexbear that words lack connotations so only one word is necessary for any concept. I’m sure that won’t have any interesting
consequencesresults. I’ll be sure to let all mycommunistliberal andanarchistliberal friends know that the great success of therevolutionaryliberal movements of the past had nothing to do with increasing literacy among the people.I’m just expressing frustration with having to look up so many words lol. It gets a bit old when half the words you look up have “archaic” next to their definition
I am begging communists to use normal words
Organization of Production? Dialectics? Ascent From the Abstract to the Concrete? Vulgar Materialism? Really? What the fuck is wrong with these people. These words are like paragraphs apart
Yeah. Seems like this same criticism can be directed at ourselves. Even saying bourgeois and proletariat sounds pretentious to most people.
And if you say you want to simplify things you’re vulgarizing Marxism-Leninism, you simply can’t win.
Meanwhile I have got tons of people to actually read and engage with ML theory because I understand it well enough and have spent a life time working retail and service jobs that I know how to talk to people in ways they will understand. It is important to read the source material so that you can do that but it also makes little sense to just regurgitate 100+ year old vocabulary. Once we have the concepts and ideas of Marxism fully absorbed into our analysis it only makes sense to explain things in terms normal people understand.
This is why (for its time) the manifesto was written in fairly plain language that the average worker could get through intuition. We gravely need more approachable theory for modern generations.
That said there is also a time and place and certain audiences that may be swayed by someone speaking like an academic authority. You just gotta kinda read the room.
If you’re not arguing over the vulgarizing of the theory of political economy by the mechanists in every minutiae possible detail then you’re a worse revisionist than <insert your favorite theoretician here>
This is also why I enjoy utilizing or retooling elements from the pamphlet ‘why communism’ by Moissaye J. Olgin when I talk shop because it’s already got the plain talks down but occasionally needs a tweak to make it applicable to whatever I’m talking about at the moment
Academics use special words because they have specific meanings that are unaffected by the changing meanings of casual use. This is why engineering terminology often sucks, because people already have an idea of what power, work, stress, strain, etc. mean, but often they are wrong, from the standpoint of physics. A layperson may think that pushing against a wall and becoming exhausted means that they have done work on the wall, when from a physics standpoint this isn’t true, because the meaning of work in physics and everyday life are different. If you try to explain the term work in everyday words, you end up spending a sentence every time: the act of force applied across a distance the object moved, measured as the crow flies from the beginning to the end point. That is why most scientific fields come up with their own terms. They are shorter than explaining it every time, they are specific, and they are unambiguous. It is not gatekeeping when Google exists, comrades.
The physics analogy helps, did you use it knowing I studied physics up until now? I did use google to define these words but I got frustrated bc I was having to google so often lol
I used it because we both studied physics (or rather, I studied engineering, so applied physics), so it was experience we could both relate to.
Edit: On the note of the frustration of having to Google words constantly, yeah that would be frustrating and make technical literature much harder to read. Maybe an imperfect solution could be to install an extension that provides the definition of a word in a pop up if you highlight a word. I used to have an extension that did that, maybe it could be of use. Don’t remember what it was called though
mfs on reddit can’t even avoid jargon to try and inflate how smart they look. i can definitely see actually accomplished academics being even more about this. especially the “sportsball is for idiots!!!” kind. they always have something to prove. being an accomplished academic just isn’t enough
There are a lot of great criticisms to be made about academics and how they eventually get caught up in little self-contained idea vortices that don’t actually matter to the world at large; they lose sight of how small their field is in the grand scheme of things and start to project its importance in their life to the wider society.
However the thing about using words like this: they are specific. It’s important to learn that just because two words are synonyms does not mean they are interchangeable. Some words are more correct for the specific idea you are trying to communicate.
Academia is completely jargon-brained. Mao was right to send them to the countryside to shovel pig shit.
Oppobrium
It just means shame, a near universal concept found in almost every single human society. “Uh aktually, oppobrium has no modern equivalent because the Roman’s understanding of shame is different from modern society.” Shame is shame. Every society has the concept of shame. Obviously, every society has their own particular twist and interpretation of it.
Latifundium
It’s just a plantation within a Roman context. Academia being jargon-brained means using this word even when it’s really obvious you’re writing something within a Roman context. If you’re writing a paper about the economy of the late Roman empire, you don’t need to say “latifundium” or even “Roman plantation.” You can just say “plantation” because the paper is obviously about Rome. Now, if you’re comparing different types of plantations, then it would make sense to use the word. If you’re comparing a Roman plantation with a Haitian plantation, using “latifundium” and “habitation” would make sense since “Roman plantation” and “Haitian plantation” gets cumbersome after a while.
Bellicose
It means warlike, aggressive, or combative. It’s one of those words that’s occasionally used in writing but never used in speech. Most people would just use “belligerent” as in a “belligerent drunk.” And I just looked it up and both “bellicose” and “belligerent” come from the same Latin “bellum” for “war.” Another instance of academia being divorced from the masses where they picked the slightly less often used word even when both words mean the same thing and come from the same Latin word.
Effete
It’s not used often and for good reason. The word has homophobic and misogynist undertones. When you call someone an effete man, you’re basically calling him a limp-wristed homo. The word originally meant “woman weakened from having just given birth.”
Etymologically, bellicose and belligerent have an important distinction. The former is warlike by nature, the latter warlike in deed. Bellicose is what you’d call the faction you’re feuding with on the grounds that they’re just like that. Belligerent means you’re starting fights.
A belligerent drunk is someone who throws hands when they’ve had too many. A bellicose drunk is your uncle who has lots of ideas about geopolitics that only come out toward the end of the reunion party.
You can just learn new words it’s possible
My gf and I have a joke where we come up with absurd thesis titles with incomprehensible jargon based on random stuff around us.
The Faba Antinomy: The Ursification of the Digital Left Hegemony and the Paradigm of the New Hexagon
Calvin and Hobbes not be based as fuck challenge level insurmountable
truly the XKCD of social criticism.
Maybe more like SMBC. Watterson knows how to draw people that aren’t stick figures.
They never miss
deleted by creator
I talked to an academic who wrote like this once and she said, “It just comes out like that in the first draft and I can never bring myself to do revisions beyond the ones requested during peer review”
A big part of the problem is that despite the job being like 80% writing, many academics have no formal writing training. This is especially true in the sciences. You’re just expected to pick it up by osmosis, and when most of the existing writing is shit, you’re gonna pick up shit.
dude reading my friend’s writing of any kind who has a masters in engineering is like putting an orbital sander to my eyes.
Jargon is often employed in the attempt to get published. Graduate students write the most papers and publications are how you get a job. Your publications will be reviewed by the most insufferable people that will give absurd feedback, so often the goal is to bamboozle them to make your work seem inscrutable. Sounding fancy and using the jargon of the trade is how you appear “serious” to the self-important assholes incompetently reviewing your work and nakedly asking you to cite their own lest they reject your paper.
Once a person gets their tenure-track job, one must basically become a self-promoting huckster to get funding and tenure. The kind of self-promoting huckster that expects the authors of papers they review to cite their own works to increase their own citation counts and prestige. And has a gigantic, yet fragile, ego.
Academia is broken due to its social relations to production, just like other jobs. There is basically no incentive to act reasonably outside of not lazily faking your data. Convincingly faking your data with cherry picking and bad analysis is the norm, though.
I want to say that this academic’s writing style sucks. But who cares, she’s just writing for her field.
People who write more pop stuff are just lazy and/or have lazy editors, so they have no excuse.
I love how some Latin-based words are fancy and complicated in English while being totally normal in Romance languages. In Portuguese, Latifúndio is like a basic word everybody uses when discussing agribusiness. Same goes for plenty of medical stuff. English speakers go to the ENT if their throat hurts. We go to the otolaryngologist, otorrinolaringologista or just otorrino.
The English translations and study of Freud use id, ego, and superego. All latin forms to denote how sophisticated and sciencey he must have been. The concepts declared as academic abstractions, special terms to learn.
In Freud’s actual writing, they are Es, Ich, and Über-Ich: “it”, “I”, and “beyond I”. In normal language, in his own tongue of German. Sure, he capitalizes them to make it clear they are dedicated concepts, but they are not Latin. That was English language academics trying to make it sound sufficiently academic.
The English language already uses a capitalised I by default in common language, so attempting to use the same conventions would be at best unnecessarily confusing.
Maybe it didn’t strictly have to be Latin, but it easily makes sense to invent discrete terms.
In English you could just write “Self” and be fine. The urge to Latinize comes from a tradition of academics trying to make something even more academic and, historically, required the “standard” education of learning Latin (and some Greek) at substantial expense of your parents. Snooty people for hundreds of years would not consider you educated (read: part of their in-group) unless you could come up with a new university motto.
Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana
One of my co-workers writes “initiate” instead of “start,” I guess to sound more official
quotidian is a good one, 'cause if you use it in English it sounds fancy and has more subtext meaning mundane but in French ‘quotidienne’ is actually very quotidian
Yup, in Portuguese we say cotidiano and it’s a very normal word too. Another good one is “perceive”, which sounds a bit more serious and scientific, but perceber, with the same origin, is used in the same casual way as “notice” would be in English.
I remember my second grade teacher being very impressed that I knew the word “sufficient.” I wasn’t well-read or anything, I just spoke Spanish. No one cares about my vocabulary now though ):
inside me are two wolves
one says just look up the words its not that hard and you might learn something
the other one says academics are deliriously gatekeeping and inflating their science to make it seem more than it really is
And both your wolves are right
The Lupine Dialectic
IMO people use jargon to make their not very smart idea seem smarter. I see it all the time.
The smartest people are ones who can explain things without resorting to a thesaurus. I think of Parenti.
Edit: Since this is gaining controversy, I’ll say that I’ve written, edited, and published many a grad level research paper. Believe me when I say that hiding behind jargon is a really thing that people do, especially in higher education. Reducing unnecessary jargon is also something that many a researcher has been urged to do. This idea isn’t original to me, I’m just repeating it here.
Those words aren’t jargon, though.
Parenti literally used Latifundium in his famous Yellow Parenti lecture though.
Learning words is good.
You can’t tell me Parenti isn’t much more readable and less jargony than other, more bourgeois historians. Finding the one counter example just feels pedantic af.
Learning words is good.
Literally no one is arguing this point with you. Have fun with that, though.
I can recall all the words in the OP being used by him, other than Oppobrium (though I’m sure he has used it somewhere). The reason I used Yellow Parenti as an example is because that is the first time I heard of it and I looked it up. I have never heard of it from any source other than
You can’t tell me Parenti isn’t much more readable and less jargony than other, more bourgeois historians
After hearing this for years I was taken aback by the forward to Blackshirts and Reds, followed by relief that the rest of the book wasn’t like that.
I didn’t remember that the preface of Blackshirts and Reds was more jargony, but here I am rereading it ATM and I can’t argue with that. I’m guessing that he wrote it last and, as his motivation was sapped, put the least amount of effort into rewriting it. Just a guess though.
Honestly I fall into jargon in my field when I’m tired or lazy. Making things make normal sense takes extra effort.
It’s not pedantic, he used one of the example words in his most famous lecture. Why?
Were his ideas not clever enough? Is he bourgeoise? Did he change terminology afterwards?
Pedantic as in finding an individual example, ignoring that overall Parenti doesn’t put unnecessary jargon in his work, especially compared to someone like Jordan Peterson or even Chomsky. Pedantic as in nitpicking a tiny element and ignoring the wider reality.
Were his ideas not clever enough? Is he bourgeoise? Did he change terminology afterwards?
Incredibly bad faith questions that I’m not going to answer.
Broadly the discussion has been very absolutist about these terms, I don’t really care wether or not Parenti is “better” on a spectrum.
I want to hear what his usage of the term in his most famous lecture actually implies about him and these sorts of terms as a whole. Is this post actually a discussion about language or just a massive circlejerk about how much we dislike academics.
ITT: anti-intellectualism is revolutionary when I like it, but reactionary when I don’t
disengage
When he used it, given the context, I understood it enough to understand what he was saying. When I read it in this post, I did not even recognize it.
I don’t think I had heard it before Parenti, maybe in a history class before. When he used it in the context of Cuba, I assumed it was the local word for plantation. Because I also knew about the legacy of Spanish empire plantations/estates.
Funnily enough, I just looked it up and it might be more appropriate to say “hacienda”, in that context. (Latifundium looks like it usually specifically refers to Roman and Spanish empire plantations.) But I DEFINITELY cannot say that with confidence, I don’t speak Latin or Spanish, and am not engaged with a field which might use either term. Being fair to him: back 30 years ago the locals he spoke to might have directly said latifundium (or something similar enough for him to use latifundium to the English crowd). Or his Roman history nerdiness is showing and he borrowed from it.
Jargon is fine, and some of it shouldn’t be explained in something like a paper. But I’ve struggled with reading articles before, not because the subject is difficult, but because the wording is obtuse. It sucks to engage in a new subject when you have to plow through 20 layers of jargon. As difficult to read as something like chemistry can be, at least they usually list SOME reading that is understandable to a layman (IE: the “official” name vs a chemical formula).
And for the reverse, overuse of jargon by a newer academic worker is a sure sign of insecurity. These are people that will break if you ask a couple challenging questions. The jargon is a shield. Unfortunately, academia creates the environment where people feel the need to do that, where they cannot be vulnerable and learn because everything is an evaluation of your worth for the “next step”, where 20 people compete for the same job and everyone else leaves the field.
Similarly, you can use jargon to make a document unassailable. Not just because it is difficult to parse, but because (1} you can always pivot around your meanings when challenged, and (2) you can embed your work in social goods and therefore characterize disagreement as a social ill of some kind. Declare your work to not just be full of jargon, but also, say, an essentially feminist work, and you can write the absolute silliest things while counting on the absolute support of around 30% of your audience, depending on the field. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, as you now also depend on the cowardice of closeted misogynists and the inefficacy of loud misogynists. To be clear, feminism itself is not a problem, it is a very good thing, but academics quickly learn they can construct unassailable works detached from intellectual merit not just by using jargon to obfuscate, but by embedding it in social contexts that inherently challenge critics. In reactionary audience contexts they do the same thing, equating communism with “bad”, praising “fecundity” in white supremacist contexts, getting weird about IQ, etc.
People always talk about the big words and always sleep on the garden path sentence structure. Also, people rarely differentiate between academic terminology and academic jargon, which are indeed different.
Most of those are just normal words
I feel like they were an ascending order of normalcy
Oppobrium? I have no idea
Latifundium? I’m not sure but I guess has to do with latifunda which are like plantations
Bellicose? Warlike from latin, bella being war
Effete? The thing I get called
Latifundium was the area around Rome i think. It now refers to an area with massive plantations (and often times slavery) where a small group of people own massive land areas and use them for cash crops at the expense of everyone who has to work for them. Oftentimes used when describing South America, particularly among leftists who refer to large landowners as Latifundistas (probably didn’t spell it right, I’ve never learned spanish or portugese)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium --> Decent wiki article
Latifundistas
Latifundiário in Portuguese, for us it’s a very common word
Thanks, I know about latifunda in the terms of calling plantations in South America that and Patrick Wyman saying latifunda on podcasts. So I could back form at a guess.
No tf they are not, I have never once heard anyone use any of these before today and certainly not in verbal usage. You connot convince me this isn’t exclusively academic language
Latifundium? Bellicose? Effete?
- is very common to use regarding the roman empire and when analysing its decline, and general imperal decline.
- literally means “warlike”, just sounds nicer
- is a good term to describe the UN and EU
3/4 were pretty normal. Maybe just work on your eloquence a bit?
Normal in academic circles sure but I studied fucking phsyics until now. These words are absolutely not in my or any normal english speaking persons vocabulary. Sure yeah, I looked up all the words and got concise definitions but I have never once fucking heard them
Are people using “jerk” and “velocity” in the sense you’re familiar with from physics in their day to day lives, or is that academic jargon?
Bellicose and effete in particular are not uncommon in everyday language, typically to describe a person’s manner. Oppobrium might not be something you say every day, but it turns up in the newspaper pretty regularly.
Then you just need to waste more time on history and politcal writings.
You’re right, they’re not used much in everyday english. They’re used in spcialist jargon tho, the difference between how specialist nerds talk and how normal people talk is always very different.
They’re used in spcialist jargon tho, the difference between how specialist nerds talk and how normal people talk is always very different.
When the former is trying to reach out to the latter, it’s on the former to adjust their language appropriately to more effectively explain their ideas.
Oh come on, “really” is quite a normal word!
Lmao
