Word: scholarspeak
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...Community" (the general subject of Number One) are either great men in government or random-sized men in universities, or both at once; and the former are so busy and responsible they tend toward fatuous effusions, the latter so cautiously rigorous they lose themselves in the impenetrable thickets of scholarspeak. Steering between them must be for a magazine, something comparable to trying to write medieval history: editors must look for pieces that paint carefully concrete examples to illustrate ideas and give them life. Although the Review swerves dangerously at times toward Washington's portentous vagueness (as in the articles...
...parodying scholarspeak, of course. Nobody in the Journal is that wretched. But in my present dour mood it seems all too plausible that courses at Harvard have broken intelligent students like those in the Journal of the habit of writing English. With the exception of Mr. Campbell's piece, which is written in an engaging mixture of tough-guy journalese and scholarspeak, all the contributions to the May Journal share an identical set of mannerisms which I take to be the rotund and doggedly impersonal tone of the properly house-broken scholar...
...Scholarspeak is easy to pick up. Anyone can master its few mechanical rules. Use the passive voice whenever possible, keep sentences and paragraphs long, verbs neutral and even drab, and nouns abstract. Load your sentences up with these abstract nouns until they're just about ready to break. But above all, of course, keep the tone dry and pompous...
...scholar deserving a wider audience for his best work than simply the brilliant grader--in a word, the Harvard undergraduate." One would not have anticipated, however, the ugly name the Journal slaps on this new beast: "the intelligent specialist non-specialist." Small wonder that these beings have lapsed into scholarspeak--no doubt out of sheer ontological terror...
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