Word: jargoning
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...catalog confirms the academic bent of the show, with essays of such jargon-filled obscurantism that they go beyond parody. Thus Avital Ronell: "What impresses itself upon us is the fact of finitude's excessive nature, not only because of the inappropriability of its meaning but, as the experience of sheer exposition, because of the way it refuses to disclose itself fully." One would bet $5 that neither David Ross nor anyone else connected with the Biennial could say what such gibberish might mean or translate it into clear English. But that would be a hegemonic transgression on the integrity...
...theme, Brainfood is in many respects user- hostile. The author is director of research at the National Institute for Medical Research in Paris; his chapters on nutritional basics bristle with such forbidding terms as neuropeptides, mitochondria and oligodendrocyte. Nonetheless, those who can surmount this barbed-wire fence of technical jargon may find other parts of Bourre's book no less pleasing than -- to cite one of his own examples -- an omelet with freshly picked Bordeaux cepe mushrooms...
...numbers person. So many people were crowded into this cubicle -- speechwriter David Kusnet, Stephanopoulos, the crew from the war room who had not left the compound since Sunday -- that it looked like the Marx Brothers' stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Hillary Clinton was reworking some of the jargon in the middle of the speech with economic adviser Robert Rubin. The motorcade was forming on the South Lawn...
Doubtless such jargon has some use, if only to justify the employment of people whom previous centuries would have regarded as socially expendable. But the conjunction of cinemaspeak and jargonese can lead only to the gradual separation of the hemispheres of our brains, and an aching descent into complete madness. For they all say the same: we are what we speak; our language--its metaphors, implicit value judgments--inform our personalities. Caught between the Scylla of cliche and the Charybdis of suffix, our future personalities cannot but disintegrate into a stewing pot of confusion, from which we yearn to return...
...this broth of verbal poverty, us poor inarticulates will have no resources to plumb the mysterious chasms of life. On one level all emotion will be encapsulated in words with the expressive power of Kevin Costner's face. On another, jargon will be so empty as to erase all valuable insights. And behind the screen of such an impotent vocabulary, behind all those psychoanalytic terms and cultural verbs, the abyss of violence, hate and hunger in the world will still stretch. To which we will only respond with a live transmission from CNN, and a denial that we can describe...