Big words are often a front for little knowledge, study finds

Do you prefer to talk about ‘‘ upright striding vertical bipedality on horizontal terrestrial substrates’’ rather than ‘‘walking on the ground’’?

Scientists have found that a greater use of jargon and specialist language is not a sign of academic prowess. It might even be a sign of insecurity.

The findings come from a study looking at, among other things, 64,000 university dissertation titles. Researchers gave each a score for readability and counted how many acronyms they used.

They had a theory that the use of complex language opaque to those outside the specialist field of knowledge would be more prevalent in those who were not secure in their status.

‘‘I did an MBA, where there was a lot of jostling for status,’’ said Zach Brown, from Columbia Business School. ‘‘If people were asked a question where they didn’t know the answer, they would throw out jargon.’’

To give an example he said was in vogue in the business world, the students would talk about ‘‘ disintermediating existing physical retail channels’’ instead of ‘‘not selling in shops’’.

Brown and his colleagues used a ranking of universities and looked at how the jargon in the 64,000 dissertations correlated with the supposed excellence of the institution producing it. They found that the lower the status of the university, the more jargon and more acronyms its PhD students used in their theses.

In several other experiments, they found the same effect. For instance, MBA students asked to pitch a company were more likely to use jargon if they thought they were competing against graduates rather than undergraduates.

Brown and his co-authors are careful to distinguish between useful technical words, which may have an academic or business purpose, and other terms that merely serve to obscure.

‘‘When someone ‘ elucidates the antecedents of consequences’ instead of ‘talks about causes and effects’, what that communicates is not about the content – it is about me,’’ he said.

In summation, the preceding dialectic provides a metacontextualisation of the academic linguistic gestalt. Or, in other words, it suggests that, often, big words are a load of tosh.