Posted on 11/23/2015 8:29:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Edited on 11/23/2015 10:24:46 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.
"Intersection" How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here's an example: "Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence."? Or: "Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media." Most of the time "intersection" exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant -- and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of "intersection" is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, "I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism."
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
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.
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’.
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.
In the engineering world, a wag is a “wild-ass guess” and a swag is a “stupid wild-ass guess”.
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.
They left out “unfriend” and “decommit”.
What a fantastic statement
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.
bkmk
It’s behind the curve, I know, but “reach out to” is cringeworthy and “share” has become touchy-feely. These phrases manipulate the image of the user as caring, feminine, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth. Now, go have a great day (FOAD).
Those two drive me insane.
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