So I’m trying to wrap up my Master’s thesis but the problem is I can’t seem to force myself to sit down and finish them damn thing. Part of the reason why is because writing a thesis is BORING. 

Okay, so I find my thesis topic to be somewhat interesting, but the style in which I am obliged to write takes all the fun out of it. I’m talking about “academese”—that garbled pseudo intelligent-sounding language so endemic to the Humanities. 

Some surmise that academese is used by academics in order to obscure really bad ideas—like Marxism. Everybody knows Communism sucks—even the Russians!—yet the only place on earth where the “virtues” of Marxism are still extolled are in the Humanities and anti-WTO protests (and in Cuba; but I reckon most Cubans have had enough of their socialist paradise).  

In order to argue that Communism (which sucks) is good, and that Capitalism (which isn’t perfect, but is far better than Communism) is bad, everything has to be turned on its head—including language. And that’s where academese comes in. Not only does it obscure meaning, it also intellectually intimidates the vast majority of people who can’t make heads or tails out of what the hell the academic is writing. The result is the majority of us assume that the sage professor—far more intelligent and educated than the rest of us proles—must be right, because by gosh, just look at how “intelligent” his writing sounds! 

If you are visiting this Web site, odds are you have a good sense of humor and an intuitive, if not intellectual, understanding of humor. Well, look what happens to humor in the hands of academics: 

Academese: The superiority theory of humor traces back to Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. This theory explains that a person laughs about misfortunes of others, because these misfortunes assert the person’s superiority on the background of shortcomings of others. For Aristotle, we laugh at inferior or ugly individuals, because we feel a joy at being superior to them. Socrates was reported by Plato as saying that the ridiculous was characterized by a display of self-ignorance. 

Translation: Some people laugh at the mentally retarded, Paris Hilton, the President of the United States (does a Bush joke make me a hack?), because it makes them feel smarter.

Academese: Incongruity: The incongruity theory states that humor is perceived at the moment of realization of incongruity between a concept involved in a certain situation and the real objects thought to be in some relation to the concept. Since the main point of the theory is not the incongruity per se, but its realization and resolution (i.e, putting the objects in question into the real relation), it is often called the incongruity-resolution theory. Francis Hutcheson expressed in Thoughts on Laughter (1725) what became a key concept in the evolving theory of the comic: laughter as a response to the perception of incongruity. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that the perceived incongruity is between a concept and the real object it represents. Hegel shared almost exactly the same view, but saw the concept as an “appearance” and believed that laughter then totally negates that appearance. For Sigmund Freud, laughter is an “economical phenomenon” whose function is to release “psychic energy” that had been wrongly mobilized by incorrect or false expectations. The first full formulation of the incongruity theory is attributed to Immanuel Kant General Theory of Verbal Humor. The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) proposed by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo (and known for some time under the name of semantic script theory of humor, SSTH) identifies a semantic model capable of expressing incongruities between semantic scripts in verbal humor; this has been seen as an important recent development in the theory of laughter.

Translation: Goofiness can be funny.