[Don Corleone]

Words like those are what the faculty lounge crowd uses to impress themselves and those in the room with them. Intelligent people do not use convoluted language to make a point.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

Of course decades ago, the left kidnapped the word ‘gay’, meaning ‘lighthearted and carefree’ and changed it to mean ‘being of an unnatural, dark, evil attraction to a member of the same sex; sexually perverted, a mental illness’.

[circlecity]

I always understood “swag” to be stolen loot. As in, “Where we gonna fence the swag”. I know in the last decade or so it has also become an acronym.

[Purdue77]

In the engineering world, a wag is a “wild-ass guess” and a swag is a “stupid wild-ass guess”.

[Fred Hayek]

It is insane people with no concept of reality who have corrupted the language. And it is no longer limited to the faculty lounge. The SJW’s have thoroughly infiltrated the human resource departments of business.

[Buckeye McFrog]

They left out “unfriend” and “decommit”.

[knarf]

I haven't read the article yet, and I will ... but the title jumped out at me

What a fantastic statement

[Billthedrill]

There are different dialects of Newspeak: you gotcher Management Speak, your Political Speak, and your Academic Speak. If you hear "leverage our core competencies to optimize stakeholder buyin", that's Management Speak. PolSpeak involves such hideosities as "shout-out" and heaven help us, "optics". Academic speak VDH captured very nicely above (the real Michel Foucault would flee screaming from the mush-headed fools invoking his name).

These dialects don't mix readily but are funniest when the speaker tries, especially when it's a politician attempting academic speak. What they have in common is the employment of otherwise innocent English words to encompass deliberately meaningless abstractions: "social justice" is a perfect example, having morphed (there's a tidy neologism right there) into "economic justice" and "environmental justice" without carrying any semantic content along with them other than a vague desire for the redistribution of material possessions having nothing to do with either economy or environment.

There is, of course, an inevitable need for specialized jargon with respect to the physical sciences; what appears to be happening here is a sort of "me-too" clutching at obscurity that impresses the rubes rather than clarity that might enlighten them. Over and above an inability to communicate is the desperate anxiety that it might not be all that good an idea, a sort of institutional paranoia in the Humanities faculties that once employed Latin and Greek as well as English in order to achieve precision of meaning and now can't, and if they can, won't. Maddening.

[Sergio]

bkmk