On erudite vernacular, i.e. big words

Professor of psychology Daniel Oppenheimer is a hero. He has finally confirmed our lingering suspicion that many of the students using big words in precept are, in fact, pretentious twits.

As reported in The Daily Princetonian last week, Oppenheimer was recently awarded an Ig Nobel prize for his paper "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

Oppenheimer substituted complex words with shorter synonyms in graduate school applications. Then he asked participants to rate the intelligence of the writer.

His conclusion: "The results ... support the notion that the use of overly complex words leads to lower evaluations of a text's author."

His research grounds George Orwell's advice to "never use a long word where a short one will do" and gives hope to every undergraduate who ever felt that his ridiculously high-minded professor was, well, using long words needlessly.

The ailment he describes has its own long word: obscurantism. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a style (as in literature or art) characterized by deliberate vagueness or abstruseness."

It is an illness we are all familiar with. It adds a meaningless "-uate" to the end of "effect," swaps "utilize" for "use" and ignores the good Old English "help" in favor of that Latin bastard child "ameliorate."

It attempts to convince us that a door is actually a "means of egress" — which is to say, a door — and that it must be "visibly recognizable as such" — which is to say, it must look like a door.

I still remember my first encounter with academic obscurantism; if I had ever witnessed a train wreck, I would probably remember that too. I was reading "Totality and Infinity" by Emmanuel Levinas, a postwar French existential philosopher.

I stopped reading after this paragraph, which I highlighted out of amusement: "Morality will oppose politics in history and will have gone beyond the functions of prudence or the canons of the beautiful to proclaim itself unconditional and universal when the eschatology of messianic peace will have come to superpose itself upon the ontology of war."

It could sound better in the original French, but somehow I doubt it.

Here, the student is in a sad situation. He is forced, with patience and reason, to read a work that may have been written with neither. What skills have we been given to distinguish a difficult text from an empty one?

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The other day in POL 350: Research Methods in Political Science, we were critiquing a number of research studies. Given one especially baffling example, Professor Kristopher Ramsay said, "Look, you're Princeton students. If even you don't understand it, it might not be a very well-written paper."

Of course this way of thinking has its limits. Students need to be challenged to progress, and challenge means encountering texts which are, on first reading, bewildering. But a bewildering text is not the same as an unintelligible one, and students know the difference between pinpointing a logical step and struggling to find logic at all.

In 1840, Arthur Schopenhauer responded to the work of G.W.F. Hegel by writing "if I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right."

However you view Hegel (I tend to agree with Schopenhauer), an interesting point is raised: some forms of writing, while academic, don't promote thought but rather "paralyze all mental powers" and "stifle all real thinking."

In "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt — a uniquely relevant work — it is claimed that the writer who uses this style is more dangerous to truth than a liar. The bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does and oppose himself to it," but rather "he pays no attention to it at all [and] by virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

So thank you, Professor Oppenheimer, for encouraging simple writing, protecting truth and hopefully making precept less pretentious.

And if you should ever find yourself in a class discussing Levinas, I enjoin you to expeditiously utilize the nearest means of egress. J.R. de Lara is a politics major from Ithaca, N.Y. He can be reached at jdelara@princeton.edu.