Free Republic

There is at least one way in which the Modern Language Association (MLA) that thousands of English professors belong to lives up to its name: they traverse in a vocabulary most of us working stiffs would never contemplate employing informally, or even formally. Here is a sampling of what we got to hear for four solid days at their annual convention in Philadelphia, with a challenge at the end: • "An alternate way of thinking about thinking." • "dialectical thinking about thought." • "inscrutability about intentionality." • "materialist environmentalism" • "flat ontologies." • "analogically affirms." • "flattened ontology" • "Undermines...