This kind of writing makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph.
I think it’s a fair feeling. There’s a certain very famous (at least in our country) Italian 19th century novel in which at a point a priest sets out to bamboozle a peasant boy to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to. His solution is to begin piling up complexity and adding a healthy dose of Latin on top, so that the illiterate farmer remains obviously confused and frustrated, but can’t even quite put the finger on where he was cheated.
To put it bluntly: talking all difficult is a good way to get away with making stupid stuff sound smart and simple stuff sound complex. You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing). Jargon is useful to summarize complex concepts in simple expressions but you often don’t need that much and the more you overload your speech with it the less people will be able to get the entire thing. Even for people who do know the jargon, recalling what each term means isn’t always immediate. So, given how easy it is to overuse jargon to fool people or to position themselves above them, it’s not that strange that we sometimes develop a heuristic that makes us suspicious of what looks like too much of it.
With the two extracts you posted, the first one sounds to me like just another declination on the theme of “to stop [bad thing] we should all become GOOD” which is always a very “no shit Sherlock” thing. The second extract honestly I can’t quite tell what is precisely saying either, which is worrying in its own way.
So, yeah, +1 for just talking as simple as possible. Not any simpler, hopefully, but there’s rarely a risk of that.
You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing).
Yeah, I suspect some intellectual groups write like this for that reason: not actively trying to trick people into thinking it’s more profound than it is, but a slow creep into too much jargon. Like a frog in boiling water.
Then, when I look at their writing, it seems needlessly intelligible to me, even when it’s writing designed for a newcomer. How do they not realize this? Maybe the water just feels warm to them.
I think it’s a fair feeling. There’s a certain very famous (at least in our country) Italian 19th century novel in which at a point a priest sets out to bamboozle a peasant boy to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to. His solution is to begin piling up complexity and adding a healthy dose of Latin on top, so that the illiterate farmer remains obviously confused and frustrated, but can’t even quite put the finger on where he was cheated.
To put it bluntly: talking all difficult is a good way to get away with making stupid stuff sound smart and simple stuff sound complex. You don’t even necessarily do it on purpose, sometimes entire groups simply drift into doing it as a result of trying to up each other in trying to sound legitimate and serious (hello, academic writing). Jargon is useful to summarize complex concepts in simple expressions but you often don’t need that much and the more you overload your speech with it the less people will be able to get the entire thing. Even for people who do know the jargon, recalling what each term means isn’t always immediate. So, given how easy it is to overuse jargon to fool people or to position themselves above them, it’s not that strange that we sometimes develop a heuristic that makes us suspicious of what looks like too much of it.
With the two extracts you posted, the first one sounds to me like just another declination on the theme of “to stop [bad thing] we should all become GOOD” which is always a very “no shit Sherlock” thing. The second extract honestly I can’t quite tell what is precisely saying either, which is worrying in its own way.
So, yeah, +1 for just talking as simple as possible. Not any simpler, hopefully, but there’s rarely a risk of that.
Yeah, I suspect some intellectual groups write like this for that reason: not actively trying to trick people into thinking it’s more profound than it is, but a slow creep into too much jargon. Like a frog in boiling water.
Then, when I look at their writing, it seems needlessly intelligible to me, even when it’s writing designed for a newcomer. How do they not realize this? Maybe the water just feels warm to them.