Triumph of the wool
UNIVERSITIES are wonderful institutions and there should be more of them, but even the most sainted body must contain some flaw. Academies of learning give us knowledge, they give us people who can build rocket ships and solar panels, transplant hearts and understand poetry.
They also give us words that make it more difficult for the average person to understand anything.
Recently I received a notice from my alma mater about a new centre for diversity studies. It quoted the head of this initiative, who said: “The Chair’s aims are to theorise contextually grounded understandings of diversity, difference and otherness, as these become salient through the current operations of power; to research how these dynamics are ‘at work’ empirically in specific sites and locations; and to develop knowledge and materials that address South African needs.”
If I were to translate that into plain language, I think it would say something like this: “We are going to find out why people in different places are so different.” And we’re going to use a lot of words to do it.
Sometimes acadamese is necessary, of course. Where would we be without discourse and tropes? (Better off, probably.)
Sometimes we may not understand concepts simply because we have not studied in that field. A colleague of mine likes to pass on invitations to public lectures, with the headline “We should go”. One of these promised to “explore and delineate aspects of moduli flow and geometry in non-extremal black hole backgrounds and flesh out constraints on the space of moduli flows that serve as an equivalent to the attractor mechanism for extremal black holes”.
I’m sure plenty of physicists rubbed their hands together with delight when they read that (“Oh goody, extremal black holes, my favourite!”) and signed up immediately.
In other contexts, however, overdressed sentences seem designed to flummox the listener. In an essay entitled Postmodernism Disrobed , scientist Richard Dawkins suggested that an intellectual impostor should not cultivate a lucid literary style: “for clarity would expose your lack of content”.
You’d think teachers would embrace simplicity to improve understanding of their subject. As far as I know, academics do not get paid by the word, but perhaps they feel they ought to give students and employers their money’s worth by knitting metaphorical hats out of long, scratchy syllables, and pulling these over the eyes of unsuspecting victims.
Speaking of hats, the saying about wool being pulled over eyes has nothing to do with the way rappers wear their beanies. The phrase was first published in a Milwaukee newspaper in 1839, in an article questioning whether leaders were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the people. (Surely not.)
Most sources agree that the expression is a reference to the woollen wigs worn by judges. The Americans had already discarded their long white hats by 1839, but European courts were still full of woolly heads.
There is no evidence to suggest that judges physically removed their wigs and clasped them over the eyes of the accused while using sign language to call for a quick verdict before lunch, but the term came to be used whenever someone in authority tried to bamboozle an underling.
Following a similar thread, Dawkins coined the term “metatwaddle” to describe the obscure, incomprehensible jargon that sometimes streams from the orifices of academia.
I can’t think of a better word for it.