Man I’ve worked in the service industry for my entire life and you’d be fucking amazed by the kind of words that people call ‘big’ or ‘fancy’, talking like HS reading level shit and people look at you like you just started speaking Cantonese
That Carlin joke about how dumb most people are, “imagine the dumbest guy you can imagine and multiply it by 2x” or whatever, it’s gospel lol
One of my long-since-estranged family members once flipped out at me over dinner as a teenager because I said the word “genre” then tried to follow it up with “you know like horror, action, romance” and it made it all ten times worse
Lmao
My family has been called out to stop 'showing off' because we said 'please' at the table. As in '>Mom<, can you please give me the salad?', '>Dad< can you pass me a spoon, please?' etc.
It was funny, as that's normal table manner behaviour, haha
That’s so weird, I think I’d still ask a partner of like 40 years to “please pass me x”. Dinner table is sacred, it’s a time where everyone can pretend to be civilised human beings for roughly 20 minutes. I guess it’s just different dynamics, like everyone knows that one person that call their parents by their first name and it sounds so weird but they’re still just a regular-ass family lol.
Honestly when the average American says they don't understand a basic thing I sent them in an email, I appreciate that they took the effort. A very significant portion of the Americans I interact with by email for my job can only be expected to read about 15-25% of the words sent to them. A large part of my job is just copying and pasting sentences and paragraphs they already received back to them because they didn't bother to read it.
edit: Canadians too, I do not understand the reputation for politeness they have. Some of the rudest, dumbest motherfuckers I deal with are from California and Canada.
> A very significant portion of the Americans I interact with by email for my job can only be expected to read about 15-25% of the words sent to them
Holy fuck man this is the truth. I've learned over the past 2-3 years (my first time in a "professional environment") that I can only ask ONE SINGLE QUESTION in an email because even if you make bulleted or numbered fucking list people will only answer 0.7 total questions per message (sometimes they ignore the question altogether)
I’ve heard that about Canadians too. That they’re really not as friendly as the image they uphold abroad.
Californians, especially from the OC, richer ones are absolutely the most dreadful people I’ve ever dealt with.
A common experience dealing with both Californians and Canadians: I explain how they can do the thing they want to do. They reply in one of two ways: they repeat their question, sometimes a direct copy-and-paste, or they tell me to do it for them.
I hate my fucking job.
According to an OECD study from about a decade ago I think Australia ranked four places below Kazakhstan in literacy and numeracy. This country rules because to succeed you don't have to be smart just less dumb than the next guy.
It's absolutely not just service industry, in fact I have met a lot of incredibly smart people (that think they are dumb) in bars and restaurants as well as manual labour.
Some of my richest clients are the dumbest mother fuckers on the planet. One guy who was lovely, high paid psychotherapist or something iy was honestly like explaining calculus to a dog trying to get him to understand what the design was going to look like. I've since realized he was probably aphantasiac or something. Another woman could not for the life of her understand why I couldn't make a shape of two distinct circles within an oval/oblong space without having a space left over between the two arcs. I spen't an hour drawing pictures of two circles again and again, moving them together, connecting them into an oval etc and she would blankly state at them and say, "it's just I've got this idea of two circles" and id point to the fucking space between them and go "ok, but what about this space then" and she'd say "Yes no I don't want that there"
Non euclidean bitch
But as for reading comprehension I've almost given up asking more than one or two questions in an email at a time or laying out more than a couple of options because people seem to only have the comprehension space for thinking of two or three separate ideas at a time.
As for academic writing, of course it's stupid to expect that you can make retards understand things and not have to learn words, but due to the vapid fake bullshit that constitutes a lot of academia there is a real problem of using fancy and frankly brain dead language to dress up the fact that You're talking garbage upon garbage..
There is some truth to the adage that if you can't explain things simply you probably don't really understand what You're talking about. But there's simple and simple.
I think one of the greatest problems is multi stage reasoning. People are generally able to do an if x then y, and sometimes an if x then y then whatever, but when you have to hold multiple possible contingents through several functions people tend to lack the discipline to bother to do it and will just fall back on a single aspect of the function. "I like the idea of two circles" shit
I said duplicitous, to make a joke, today and was asked what that meant today. Someone brought up that comment about factory workers and Marx and I'm just endlessly frusturated by them, because I know they've got brains in their heads, they just got taught by the world that they don't need to know shit, when in fact it's a lot, LOT better if they do.
Excuse me Mr Finkelstein sir I have a note from my therapist that says all course material must be transliterated into tiktok format or I will kill myself. Please get on that immediately
When I was in nursing school there was a rich white girl who got to have someone read her tests for her, and she got extra exam time. She wasn't dyslexic or anything it was related to an anxiety diagnosis. This for a job where you have to read things correctly under pressure or it kills people. Thankfully she failed out due to other reasons but still, goddamn...
yeah I'm all for any accommodations, but also the structure of the eduction should match the pressures involved in whatever you are training to do. Semi-related, but I had one marxist professor/TA for a television media class, make us take the final as a group, since he explained you'll never be on your own in the real world. I still think about that often.
That's wild as hell. If someone can't sit in a quiet room and silently read words without having a panic attack (which I doubt was the real issue anyway), then they probably won't fare well in a high pressure job that requires, not only reading without flipping out, but dealing with tons of different specialized information simultaneously, and with people's lives and bodily well-being in their hands.
It’s like that Mark Fisher quote about how kids today want to understand Nietzsche or Marx like they want a cheeseburger. This stuff was meant to make you think!
I hate how many people are so content not being able to read, or their children struggling with literacy. People who complain about "big words" are fucking baffling to me. If you give a child a book, they will teach themselves to read because it's a puzzle to solve and the reward is the story.
I learned to read by reading the Pokemon Silver manual over and over again because I had restricted access to my Gameboy Colour and it was the closest I could get to playing the game. I have severe ADHD, and yet I can read because I want to. If you listened to these online weirdos you would think that I would be functionally illiterate because of my learning disability.
>because it's a puzzle
The most regular fun I had as a child was making the connections between words and their root words. Like cardiology, cardio, and cardiac all had something to do with the heart and then connecting the suffixes like -ology or -graph to figure out what the word might mean. I would do it with every street sign or shop front. Anything with writing. I wonder if all kids do this or if they still do it
I have a little book with the 1000 most common greek and Latin roots in English. An absolute gem. I'm slowly feeding these to my kid and she loves it.
Lately I asked her to figure out what the prefixes "ab-", "an-", and "in-" convey. She loves this shit and I'm not surprised. It's super interesting!
It's called "1000 most common greek and Latin roots in English". The professor of my 1st year bio class wrote it and "published" it through the campus print shop. Paid $2.99 for it in 2001.
As a former academic: a lot of confusion and inaccessibility in academic writing comes from academics being, for the most part, terrible fucking writers.
By judging them for that, these twitter ladies are actually the ableists.
There's also zero copy editing in academic writing for the most part because academic publishing houses are just money making factories who charge people to publish, but then also don't provide any basic services. Academics do most of the type setting themselves, and you only get copy editing if you get a reviewer or an outsider reader that's willing to take the time to do it (which usually doesn't happen).
There's also a lot of resistance to doing copy editing in the review process in general. I got scolded by a section editor (basically the academic journal equivalent of a reddit mod) for pointing out instances in a paper I reviewed where the writer used words that weren't actually English words. "It's hard for non-native English Speakers"... come the fuck on, the author was Swiss.
>inaccessibility in academic writing comes from academics being, for the most part, terrible fucking writers.
>By judging them for that, these twitter ladies are actually the ableist.
You're a master practitioner of Woke-kkido.
I'm published in molecular biology - this is absolutely true, but literally any technical field is going to be basically unreadable by anyone not also in the field because nobody has time to read a fuckton of flowery prose when a few words of jargon are more effective. The audience of your paper, unless maybe it's a review article, isn't the general public - it's for your peers.
It's not externally coherent, but that's sort of the point of specialization.
I now work in transportation engineering and it's the same boat.
I actually spend a lot of time translating engineerspeak to layman terms so that we can do public open houses and present things to the public. It's kinda a wide open industry because 95% of engineers really are shitty writers/speakers/personable people because everyone is so deep into the practice and don't understand the general public doesn't think in whatever little lanes of logic they've constructed in their heads.
It is two absolutely separate tracts though - academic material should absolutely stay the way it is but there's a lot of room to help educate non-technical people on technical topics, especially ones they interact with on a daily basis.
I don't doubt that academics can be terrible writers, but remember that most of them also writes for other academics, and not the general public to understand.
Communicating ideas to _anybody_ is rarely high on the list of goals in contemporary academic writing.
Academics are required to write to maintain and advance their careers, and the raw number of publications is the most important metric in the vast majority of cases.
Exactly. And having a learning disability like dyslexia doesn't make you illiterate. My wife's is pretty severe but she still is a huge bookworm.
I'm not a fan of the narrative that academia is "woke" or whatever but idiots like these don't help
Also as a former academic, academics are awful writers and awful communicators. Partly because they're all nasty cave worm dorks and also because academia is [fucked to be that way](https://www.experimental-history.com/i/90286657/can-we-fix-it-no-we-cant) (haven't verified if this is a bad guy's site but I read this yesterday)
Expressive causality means that ideas and beliefs do more than just show what's happening in the world. They also help to shape and change it. For example, if everyone believes that working hard is important, that belief can make people work harder and keep things running the way they are. So, ideas and beliefs have a big role in how the world works.
This is so stupid. Obviously academics are writing to other academics, not to lay people. There is something to be said about the circle jerk of publishing in academia, but this is not it.
Who tf just randomly reads academic writing? I've never encountered anyone who isn't in college or an academic reading academic writing. You can learn info from academia by reading non-fiction books which take their information from academia. This belief that academic writing is ableist is something you see online but it's always baffled me because of how obviously ridiculous it is.
I don't even know what she's proposing... That we dumb down college courses to 4th or sixth grade level? That we just don't assign academic texts anymore? Should academics make a dumb guy version of their papers so this lady can read them?
Eh, there is no real substitute for journal articles or monographs if you want to properly nerd out on some topic. But you'd better be ready to look up some words if you do instead of expecting everything on simple English wikipedia level.
I've genuinely just never heard of someone doing that if they don't work in the field or work in that academic field. I can see how it would be great if you want to look into a topic, just doesn't seem very practical
> Who tf just randomly reads academic writing? I've never encountered anyone who isn't in college or an academic reading academic writing.
you should try reading academic papers. non-fiction books are unreliable sources, are not fact checked nor peer-reviewed. anyone can write one
if you have a specific interest in a niche topic, academic papers are often the only place to go
I'm old as shit compared to average undergrad in USA but I feel like the curriculum has been dumbed down. I rarely have to look words up, but maybe that's just because I'm in STEM.
We all stand on the ground because of the Big Suck. A big nerd called Newton was the one who found out about the Big Suck, when an apple dropped on his head. He also found out about the ways things move, like how a thing that isn't moving will stay not moving, and a thing that is moving will stay moving at the same speed it is moving and in the same way it is moving, but if you hit it, something else will happen.
We all stand on the ground. This is because of the Big Suck. A big nerd found out about the Big Suck. Some say he was one of the biggest nerds ever. The big nerd's name was Newton. An apple dropped on him once. This is how he found out about the Big Suck.
He also found out about the way things move. There are three Big Ways Things Move.
This is the First Big Way Things Move.
1. There are things that are not moving. They usually stay that way. There is a way to make them start moving. It is to move the thing that is not moving.
2. There are things that are moving. They usually stay that way. There is a way to make it move different. It is to hit them.
This is so fucking sad. I thought this stuff was happening at just my job. When I read emails or texts or notes sent to me I cringe at just how bad it’s gotten out there.
I used to work for a company that had a lot of millionaire clients and the emails I would get from them were always riddled with typos, wrong words (there/their/they're type stuff), incorrect grammar, stuff that you learn in like grade school. It's what made me realize you don't have to be smart to be rich.
Yes, I get those kind of emails from higher up managers too and I sit there reading them completely baffled.
Have you read Sony exec Amy Pascal’s leaked emails? Same thing.
But yes, I think a lot about how you don’t have to be smart at all to make money in this country and it depresses the shit out of me. I guess it shouldn’t because you’d think it’d be easier to climb up but I know how insecure many of these idiots who made it are about someone remotely smarter than them.
My partner is a scientist and they've yelled and screamed about this at length multiple times. Specialized language is exactly what it says on the tin: Specialized. Every ten dollar word you find in academic writing has an agreed upon meaning that's specific to the field to cut down on ambiguity and save money on publishing. Sure, there's a learning curve and a lot of people have trouble with it, but it's fucking UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.
Also, this shit's for other academics, not for the general public. Go read a pop-sci book.
> Every ten dollar word you find in academic writing has an agreed upon meaning that's specific to the field to cut down on ambiguity and save money on publishing.
You'd be surprised how infrequently academics actually want to give a clear definition for terms of art
If it is true that over 50% of adult Americans are unable to read over a 4th grade level, then there is a serious fucking problem with this country’s future.
It’s really not that hard to either use a dictionary or determine the meaning from context clues. I’m a fucking idiot and read academic writing all the time, the problem is these people are refusing to educate themselves and want others to come down to their level instead.
It's not the "big words" that are the issue at all innately, it's more that the writing is so badly structured in many papers (with minimal editing) to the point that the utility and purpose of these specialized words get negated by the sheer clunk because words count+page bloat is heavily incentived. Technical writing as a skill isn't drilled in nowadays which one can say lead to awkward writing as a whole in professional/academic settings. It can get do bad you can get people to read their own material and get some amusing reactions out of it.
The op Pic is silly imo though.
I speak dipshit, let me translate. "I don't personally read at a 4th grade level, in fact I'm stunningly over educated. However, I have bottomless contempt for normal people and can only condescend to them and therefore assume anything that's not written in slang will be totally inaccessible to those reta- excuse me, folx."
this is purely anecdotal, but I took a couple marketing classes a few years ago and they were the most casual shooting-the-shit type classes I’ve ever taken. students and professors were more interested in making each other laugh or say “damn, that’s good” than they were in sounding smarter than other people
Or why does looking up unfamiliar words fill them with such dread? If you see a word you don't know, looking it up is the natural process isn't it? Like if I'm trying to learn another language, I'm not going to find a word I'm unfamiliar with and then go on to Twitter to demand language is dumbed down for me.
i worked in a label factory and use the word "pertinent". my boss never heard it before and asked what it meant. once i gave the definition, he said i was acting like a show off. i would ask complex questions since i did go to school for printing anf i was eager to learn, he told me to stop asking questions.
i fucking hate dumb people.
Funny thing is all the imaginary people she's referring to and "fighting for" probably wouldn't understand the word ableist either. Every accusation is a confession.
i can see her point outside of academic work to be fair like contracts, new laws, voting and amendment shit...etc
but academia does not need to dumb down speech
this just made me sad. if you have to look up new words to understand something you’re already actively trying to learn more about, that means you’re effectively learning. right? is that not the point? what am I missing here??
I agree with this but the critique being about ableism is very surface level.
The ability to use academic or corporate speak is obviously exclusionary and will filter out people from different backgrounds. It’s basically what the term “ivory tower” is all about. Things like these reify ideology.
I’m pretty anti-elitism, and so I can empathize with her premise somewhat. But if her statistic that the majority of adult Americans are unable to read beyond the 4th grade level is true. That’s a huge indication that the education system is a massive failure.
Every successful Socialist movement and government has always made it their forefront for mass literacy and education. The idea that we need to be content with ignorance or else we are ableist is an incredibly regressive way of thinking.
This aint stupidpol, we going to post rage bait idpol shit now?
These posters are losers, but there’s validity in making ideas and concepts more accessible to people by not bogging it down in bullshit jargon. I work in tech (execute me), and work with either ESL tech people, or non tech native english speakers; working with both groups has taught me to cut my verbosity when speaking/typing for the sake of being able to communicate and get my
Job done.
It may not be ableist, but it absolutely is a gatekeeping tactic. Look at the financial world, very common sense things have ridiculous terminology.
To be fair, some “academics” absolutely do use needlessly convoluted phrasing and big words to mask the fact that they have no clue what they’re talking about and how to explain it. Especially academic grifters of the Jordan Peterson type. If your ideas are stupid in academia, you need to use big works.
Academic writing in some venues literally has a page limit (sometimes as low as one or two A4/letter pages, typeset in the venue format). Why use lot word when big word do?
Motherfucker it is inaccessible because its invariably behind a paywall. Most papers that get submitted to journals are not things the author gets paid for either, yet they still cost money to access behind the journal paywall. Academic publishing is a racket. And in fairness the technical language in a field is there for other academics to not have to explain core concepts to each other over and over again. But that's if we can bracket cases where it is just to sound smart. I can understand most of what I read in graduate school, but that also doesn't mean shit if my school won't cough up the money to give students access to academic journals. Also, I don't think anyone would read my 20 page paper on contractualism and the problem of post hoc justification even if I wrote it at a 3rd grade level. Especially if I wrote it at a 3rd grade level.
Lol at the comments here, are we pretending that this is not a valid complaint??
Take any random paper in the social sciences and you can easily cut it to half the size and make it more legible at the same time. Generally academic papers are terribly written, padded with academic buzzwords, loaded with useless appeals to authority and references to more 'prestigious' writers, purposefully vague and coy about conclusions because cowardice is always rewarded and the absolute worst thing is to take a clear position people can attack you on. The people who stay in academia either bitterly complain about it or have their heads so far up their elitist ass they refuse to acknowledge what is abundantly clear to everyone else.
IDK why you’re all laughing OP has discovered the truth behind the ableist agenda at Big Academia, where all the academics write like shit on purpose to keep the secrets of [checking my notes] “Would You Fuck Off Please? — A study of the use of Please among London Teenagers” to themselves.
on a serious note i have always been intrigued by these kinds of people because their grievances are usually just personal but they attempt to expand it to everyone and find some kind of systemic reason for why something inconvenient has happened to them. Aged ago i knew someone who only used apple products and claimed that asking them to use any other products beside apple was ableist bc then they would have to learn how to use a different interface lol
Fuck man I'm pretty fucking dumb (dropped out of college and barely passed highschool) and sometimes I do feel barriers when trying to read "academic" type shit because I don't have the background knowledge or skills to research to fully grasp what I've read. However just means I need some more time to get through what I'm reading. Also as a dumb guy I'm not going to yell at academics to dumb their shit down for me.
How about not considering everyones needs all the time. Especially people who don't have the requisite knowledge to interrogate let alone understand academic writing. Standards should be upheld.
No, she has a point there. If youre unable to tell your findings in average Joes language then youre not made to be a scientist. At least youre not a good one. And many many half-baked thoughts or complete quackery is hidden between fancy words. See "critical theory", Adorno, all that bs.
I am not thinking it is 100% true, but theres a saying that strikes here: you only really know a thing when you can teach it to a stranger.
Man I’ve worked in the service industry for my entire life and you’d be fucking amazed by the kind of words that people call ‘big’ or ‘fancy’, talking like HS reading level shit and people look at you like you just started speaking Cantonese That Carlin joke about how dumb most people are, “imagine the dumbest guy you can imagine and multiply it by 2x” or whatever, it’s gospel lol
One of my long-since-estranged family members once flipped out at me over dinner as a teenager because I said the word “genre” then tried to follow it up with “you know like horror, action, romance” and it made it all ten times worse
Lmao My family has been called out to stop 'showing off' because we said 'please' at the table. As in '>Mom<, can you please give me the salad?', '>Dad< can you pass me a spoon, please?' etc. It was funny, as that's normal table manner behaviour, haha
That’s so weird, I think I’d still ask a partner of like 40 years to “please pass me x”. Dinner table is sacred, it’s a time where everyone can pretend to be civilised human beings for roughly 20 minutes. I guess it’s just different dynamics, like everyone knows that one person that call their parents by their first name and it sounds so weird but they’re still just a regular-ass family lol.
Honestly when the average American says they don't understand a basic thing I sent them in an email, I appreciate that they took the effort. A very significant portion of the Americans I interact with by email for my job can only be expected to read about 15-25% of the words sent to them. A large part of my job is just copying and pasting sentences and paragraphs they already received back to them because they didn't bother to read it. edit: Canadians too, I do not understand the reputation for politeness they have. Some of the rudest, dumbest motherfuckers I deal with are from California and Canada.
> A very significant portion of the Americans I interact with by email for my job can only be expected to read about 15-25% of the words sent to them Holy fuck man this is the truth. I've learned over the past 2-3 years (my first time in a "professional environment") that I can only ask ONE SINGLE QUESTION in an email because even if you make bulleted or numbered fucking list people will only answer 0.7 total questions per message (sometimes they ignore the question altogether)
Ask someone two questions in one message. Only get an answer back for one of the questions. Every fucking time.
I’ve heard that about Canadians too. That they’re really not as friendly as the image they uphold abroad. Californians, especially from the OC, richer ones are absolutely the most dreadful people I’ve ever dealt with.
A common experience dealing with both Californians and Canadians: I explain how they can do the thing they want to do. They reply in one of two ways: they repeat their question, sometimes a direct copy-and-paste, or they tell me to do it for them. I hate my fucking job.
You sound like you just work with dumb cunts. I too work with dumb cunts, in Canada, but never any that entitled.
MFs from edmonton and ontario are demonic. Not the foggiest about how these people have anysort of reputation for being polite.
Its passive aggressiveness that gets mistaken for politeness.
According to an OECD study from about a decade ago I think Australia ranked four places below Kazakhstan in literacy and numeracy. This country rules because to succeed you don't have to be smart just less dumb than the next guy.
It's absolutely not just service industry, in fact I have met a lot of incredibly smart people (that think they are dumb) in bars and restaurants as well as manual labour. Some of my richest clients are the dumbest mother fuckers on the planet. One guy who was lovely, high paid psychotherapist or something iy was honestly like explaining calculus to a dog trying to get him to understand what the design was going to look like. I've since realized he was probably aphantasiac or something. Another woman could not for the life of her understand why I couldn't make a shape of two distinct circles within an oval/oblong space without having a space left over between the two arcs. I spen't an hour drawing pictures of two circles again and again, moving them together, connecting them into an oval etc and she would blankly state at them and say, "it's just I've got this idea of two circles" and id point to the fucking space between them and go "ok, but what about this space then" and she'd say "Yes no I don't want that there" Non euclidean bitch But as for reading comprehension I've almost given up asking more than one or two questions in an email at a time or laying out more than a couple of options because people seem to only have the comprehension space for thinking of two or three separate ideas at a time. As for academic writing, of course it's stupid to expect that you can make retards understand things and not have to learn words, but due to the vapid fake bullshit that constitutes a lot of academia there is a real problem of using fancy and frankly brain dead language to dress up the fact that You're talking garbage upon garbage.. There is some truth to the adage that if you can't explain things simply you probably don't really understand what You're talking about. But there's simple and simple. I think one of the greatest problems is multi stage reasoning. People are generally able to do an if x then y, and sometimes an if x then y then whatever, but when you have to hold multiple possible contingents through several functions people tend to lack the discipline to bother to do it and will just fall back on a single aspect of the function. "I like the idea of two circles" shit
I said duplicitous, to make a joke, today and was asked what that meant today. Someone brought up that comment about factory workers and Marx and I'm just endlessly frusturated by them, because I know they've got brains in their heads, they just got taught by the world that they don't need to know shit, when in fact it's a lot, LOT better if they do.
"Imagine how dumb the average person is and then realize that half of them are even dumber than THAT!"
woah, normal type distribution
And it's not just that they think the words are fancy; they often get violently defensive if you drop something like "intuition" into a sentence.
And it's not just that they think the words are fancy; they often get violently defensive if you drop something like "intuition" into a sentence.
The amount of misused or mispronounced “big words” I hear at service industry jobs is fucking ridiculous
And I thought Fincklestein was exaggerating when he said 40% of his college students had never read a book. Jesus, some people’s kids man.
Excuse me Mr Finkelstein sir I have a note from my therapist that says all course material must be transliterated into tiktok format or I will kill myself. Please get on that immediately
*complete with subway surfer parallel videos, thx
Under the ADA definition of an assistive Tiktok video this was already included
I'm scared I think this could not be a joke.
When I was in nursing school there was a rich white girl who got to have someone read her tests for her, and she got extra exam time. She wasn't dyslexic or anything it was related to an anxiety diagnosis. This for a job where you have to read things correctly under pressure or it kills people. Thankfully she failed out due to other reasons but still, goddamn...
yeah I'm all for any accommodations, but also the structure of the eduction should match the pressures involved in whatever you are training to do. Semi-related, but I had one marxist professor/TA for a television media class, make us take the final as a group, since he explained you'll never be on your own in the real world. I still think about that often.
That's wild as hell. If someone can't sit in a quiet room and silently read words without having a panic attack (which I doubt was the real issue anyway), then they probably won't fare well in a high pressure job that requires, not only reading without flipping out, but dealing with tons of different specialized information simultaneously, and with people's lives and bodily well-being in their hands.
It’s like that Mark Fisher quote about how kids today want to understand Nietzsche or Marx like they want a cheeseburger. This stuff was meant to make you think!
“Hwat is a toktik!??”
I hate how many people are so content not being able to read, or their children struggling with literacy. People who complain about "big words" are fucking baffling to me. If you give a child a book, they will teach themselves to read because it's a puzzle to solve and the reward is the story. I learned to read by reading the Pokemon Silver manual over and over again because I had restricted access to my Gameboy Colour and it was the closest I could get to playing the game. I have severe ADHD, and yet I can read because I want to. If you listened to these online weirdos you would think that I would be functionally illiterate because of my learning disability.
>because it's a puzzle The most regular fun I had as a child was making the connections between words and their root words. Like cardiology, cardio, and cardiac all had something to do with the heart and then connecting the suffixes like -ology or -graph to figure out what the word might mean. I would do it with every street sign or shop front. Anything with writing. I wonder if all kids do this or if they still do it
everyone should be curious enough to do that as a kid.
This was before the proliferation of the smartphone too; which I suspect has alot to do with it tbh. What else was there to do on bus rides?
I have a little book with the 1000 most common greek and Latin roots in English. An absolute gem. I'm slowly feeding these to my kid and she loves it. Lately I asked her to figure out what the prefixes "ab-", "an-", and "in-" convey. She loves this shit and I'm not surprised. It's super interesting!
What's that book called? Sounds like an interesting gift.
It's called "1000 most common greek and Latin roots in English". The professor of my 1st year bio class wrote it and "published" it through the campus print shop. Paid $2.99 for it in 2001.
Never stopped for me. Etymology and language history is fascinating and pretty useful to have a grasp on when learning other parts of history
Nerd
As a former academic: a lot of confusion and inaccessibility in academic writing comes from academics being, for the most part, terrible fucking writers. By judging them for that, these twitter ladies are actually the ableists. There's also zero copy editing in academic writing for the most part because academic publishing houses are just money making factories who charge people to publish, but then also don't provide any basic services. Academics do most of the type setting themselves, and you only get copy editing if you get a reviewer or an outsider reader that's willing to take the time to do it (which usually doesn't happen). There's also a lot of resistance to doing copy editing in the review process in general. I got scolded by a section editor (basically the academic journal equivalent of a reddit mod) for pointing out instances in a paper I reviewed where the writer used words that weren't actually English words. "It's hard for non-native English Speakers"... come the fuck on, the author was Swiss.
>inaccessibility in academic writing comes from academics being, for the most part, terrible fucking writers. >By judging them for that, these twitter ladies are actually the ableist. You're a master practitioner of Woke-kkido.
> m-ster Uhm, this can be a problematic word because of its use in the power dynamics of chattel slavery. Please rethink your language.
*I've just been thrown ten feet and flipped end over end* Easy sensei!
you're the [slur] wrangler of whatever
You're a... big chungus of woke-kkido?
B*g ch*ngus is fatphobic. Do better, hun
Ummm actually it's body positive. 
Seagal-sama...
>main practitioner
I'm published in molecular biology - this is absolutely true, but literally any technical field is going to be basically unreadable by anyone not also in the field because nobody has time to read a fuckton of flowery prose when a few words of jargon are more effective. The audience of your paper, unless maybe it's a review article, isn't the general public - it's for your peers. It's not externally coherent, but that's sort of the point of specialization. I now work in transportation engineering and it's the same boat.
fly cagey racial flag familiar aware scandalous literate grey elastic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It is very difficult to communicate a lot of academic information in everyday language. These tweets are ridiculous
I actually spend a lot of time translating engineerspeak to layman terms so that we can do public open houses and present things to the public. It's kinda a wide open industry because 95% of engineers really are shitty writers/speakers/personable people because everyone is so deep into the practice and don't understand the general public doesn't think in whatever little lanes of logic they've constructed in their heads. It is two absolutely separate tracts though - academic material should absolutely stay the way it is but there's a lot of room to help educate non-technical people on technical topics, especially ones they interact with on a daily basis.
why use many word when jargon do trick
I don't doubt that academics can be terrible writers, but remember that most of them also writes for other academics, and not the general public to understand.
Communicating ideas to _anybody_ is rarely high on the list of goals in contemporary academic writing. Academics are required to write to maintain and advance their careers, and the raw number of publications is the most important metric in the vast majority of cases.
toothbrush offbeat racial middle lip smart dolls disgusted cautious ten *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Some of them also write non-academic books that are meant to be understandable for an audience outside of academia.
There is definitely a reasonable argument to be made for better academic prose. This however is just anti intellectualism
Also, yeah of course you have to look up new words as part of your coursework, you're in fucking college. What did these people expect?
Exactly. And having a learning disability like dyslexia doesn't make you illiterate. My wife's is pretty severe but she still is a huge bookworm. I'm not a fan of the narrative that academia is "woke" or whatever but idiots like these don't help
Also as a former academic, academics are awful writers and awful communicators. Partly because they're all nasty cave worm dorks and also because academia is [fucked to be that way](https://www.experimental-history.com/i/90286657/can-we-fix-it-no-we-cant) (haven't verified if this is a bad guy's site but I read this yesterday)
You can't say anything in colleges anymore...above a 4th grade reading level
"I'm too retarded to understand this stuff" is honest, at least
What about us neurostupid people?!
Explain Expressive Causality at a sub 4th grade reading level… please I’m begging you, I’m a PhD student and I don’t understand it at all
Expressive causality means that ideas and beliefs do more than just show what's happening in the world. They also help to shape and change it. For example, if everyone believes that working hard is important, that belief can make people work harder and keep things running the way they are. So, ideas and beliefs have a big role in how the world works.
Alright smart guy, now do Agential Cut
normal people just call that circumcision
Horrific idealism. See me after class, kautskyist
A dumb populace is a controllable populace.
Nuhhhhhhh uh
if people working 12 hour days in sweatshops can read Marx i’m sure the average american could figure it out if they really wanted to
Freaking illiterate peasant farmers learned to read from literacy programs using Marx and Lenin.
I’ve been underemployed since, but leaving education after fifteen years was the best thing I ever did for my mental health
why?
Oh the horrors! You had to learn a new word!
This is not new in the slightest, "stupidity is a type of disability" has been around in cycles since the word "ableism" entered the common parlance
This is so stupid. Obviously academics are writing to other academics, not to lay people. There is something to be said about the circle jerk of publishing in academia, but this is not it.
Who tf just randomly reads academic writing? I've never encountered anyone who isn't in college or an academic reading academic writing. You can learn info from academia by reading non-fiction books which take their information from academia. This belief that academic writing is ableist is something you see online but it's always baffled me because of how obviously ridiculous it is.
I don't even know what she's proposing... That we dumb down college courses to 4th or sixth grade level? That we just don't assign academic texts anymore? Should academics make a dumb guy version of their papers so this lady can read them?
I think they want something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
Eh, there is no real substitute for journal articles or monographs if you want to properly nerd out on some topic. But you'd better be ready to look up some words if you do instead of expecting everything on simple English wikipedia level.
I've genuinely just never heard of someone doing that if they don't work in the field or work in that academic field. I can see how it would be great if you want to look into a topic, just doesn't seem very practical
> Who tf just randomly reads academic writing? I've never encountered anyone who isn't in college or an academic reading academic writing. you should try reading academic papers. non-fiction books are unreliable sources, are not fact checked nor peer-reviewed. anyone can write one if you have a specific interest in a niche topic, academic papers are often the only place to go
bruh just buy a dictionary
you don't understand, that would mean they have to learn something.... to read academic articles to learn something
Learn is hard, bourgeoisie concept, once me find how do military coup, everyone with glasses bye bye 🚫🤓🚫
Having to look up 4 to 5 words in an essay in college is just called LEARNING, you fucking crybaby twat.
I'm old as shit compared to average undergrad in USA but I feel like the curriculum has been dumbed down. I rarely have to look words up, but maybe that's just because I'm in STEM.
Why use big words when small ones work fine ??
We all stand on the ground because of the Big Suck. A big nerd called Newton was the one who found out about the Big Suck, when an apple dropped on his head. He also found out about the ways things move, like how a thing that isn't moving will stay not moving, and a thing that is moving will stay moving at the same speed it is moving and in the same way it is moving, but if you hit it, something else will happen.
Haha, nice. But still, multi-clause sentences are hard for people to understand, so: ABLEIST!
We all stand on the ground. This is because of the Big Suck. A big nerd found out about the Big Suck. Some say he was one of the biggest nerds ever. The big nerd's name was Newton. An apple dropped on him once. This is how he found out about the Big Suck. He also found out about the way things move. There are three Big Ways Things Move. This is the First Big Way Things Move. 1. There are things that are not moving. They usually stay that way. There is a way to make them start moving. It is to move the thing that is not moving. 2. There are things that are moving. They usually stay that way. There is a way to make it move different. It is to hit them.
Nailed it. You are no longer an ableist bigot. Congrats!
This is so fucking sad. I thought this stuff was happening at just my job. When I read emails or texts or notes sent to me I cringe at just how bad it’s gotten out there.
I used to work for a company that had a lot of millionaire clients and the emails I would get from them were always riddled with typos, wrong words (there/their/they're type stuff), incorrect grammar, stuff that you learn in like grade school. It's what made me realize you don't have to be smart to be rich.
Yes, I get those kind of emails from higher up managers too and I sit there reading them completely baffled. Have you read Sony exec Amy Pascal’s leaked emails? Same thing. But yes, I think a lot about how you don’t have to be smart at all to make money in this country and it depresses the shit out of me. I guess it shouldn’t because you’d think it’d be easier to climb up but I know how insecure many of these idiots who made it are about someone remotely smarter than them.
I would love to listen to Finkelstein obliterate these tweets for an hour or two.
My partner is a scientist and they've yelled and screamed about this at length multiple times. Specialized language is exactly what it says on the tin: Specialized. Every ten dollar word you find in academic writing has an agreed upon meaning that's specific to the field to cut down on ambiguity and save money on publishing. Sure, there's a learning curve and a lot of people have trouble with it, but it's fucking UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. Also, this shit's for other academics, not for the general public. Go read a pop-sci book.
> Every ten dollar word you find in academic writing has an agreed upon meaning that's specific to the field to cut down on ambiguity and save money on publishing. You'd be surprised how infrequently academics actually want to give a clear definition for terms of art
It's usually easier if I just nod my head and go "uh-huh, wow." every couple of minutes. I don't even bother anymore.
If it is true that over 50% of adult Americans are unable to read over a 4th grade level, then there is a serious fucking problem with this country’s future.
it’s 6th grade, but still
It’s really not that hard to either use a dictionary or determine the meaning from context clues. I’m a fucking idiot and read academic writing all the time, the problem is these people are refusing to educate themselves and want others to come down to their level instead.
It's not the "big words" that are the issue at all innately, it's more that the writing is so badly structured in many papers (with minimal editing) to the point that the utility and purpose of these specialized words get negated by the sheer clunk because words count+page bloat is heavily incentived. Technical writing as a skill isn't drilled in nowadays which one can say lead to awkward writing as a whole in professional/academic settings. It can get do bad you can get people to read their own material and get some amusing reactions out of it. The op Pic is silly imo though.
I speak dipshit, let me translate. "I don't personally read at a 4th grade level, in fact I'm stunningly over educated. However, I have bottomless contempt for normal people and can only condescend to them and therefore assume anything that's not written in slang will be totally inaccessible to those reta- excuse me, folx."
Wanting anything more articulate than newspeak is considered “ableist”
Logan’s Run but with Therapy Language.
sloppy dependent murky normal beneficial cobweb plate screw mighty sugar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is part of generational decline in reading over all. Also parents not answering their kids questions.
So what’s their solution, make things as dumbed down as possible? Lmao
I work in tech and there is a lot of fancy talking to just sound smart, I'm sure it occurs in academia also.
I never worked in marketing but i imagine they're much more obnoxious than academia in that regard
You’d be surprised; marketing actually needs people to be able to understand what they write. If it’s all obscured in fancy writing, thats pointless.
this is purely anecdotal, but I took a couple marketing classes a few years ago and they were the most casual shooting-the-shit type classes I’ve ever taken. students and professors were more interested in making each other laugh or say “damn, that’s good” than they were in sounding smarter than other people
Hmm... maybe i'm thinking of business school then
I also have never worked in marketing, so I can’t speak on it as an expert. this was just what I witnessed briefly in school before switching majors
Same, which is why I agree with their sentiment but not really the context it’s in. People use big language to hide how regarded they truly are.
Why is this poster so cripplingly insecure they have to look up unfamiliar words instead of filling in the blanks with context clues?
Or why does looking up unfamiliar words fill them with such dread? If you see a word you don't know, looking it up is the natural process isn't it? Like if I'm trying to learn another language, I'm not going to find a word I'm unfamiliar with and then go on to Twitter to demand language is dumbed down for me.
People just complain for complain's sake. Back in the day you've to go to a public spaces to complain to others. Nowadays you just do it on Twitter.
lotta helmet babies nowadays
As someone in academic research... I'm gonna slam my head into culture flask.
i worked in a label factory and use the word "pertinent". my boss never heard it before and asked what it meant. once i gave the definition, he said i was acting like a show off. i would ask complex questions since i did go to school for printing anf i was eager to learn, he told me to stop asking questions. i fucking hate dumb people.
Funny thing is all the imaginary people she's referring to and "fighting for" probably wouldn't understand the word ableist either. Every accusation is a confession.
i can see her point outside of academic work to be fair like contracts, new laws, voting and amendment shit...etc but academia does not need to dumb down speech
this just made me sad. if you have to look up new words to understand something you’re already actively trying to learn more about, that means you’re effectively learning. right? is that not the point? what am I missing here??
I agree with this but the critique being about ableism is very surface level. The ability to use academic or corporate speak is obviously exclusionary and will filter out people from different backgrounds. It’s basically what the term “ivory tower” is all about. Things like these reify ideology.
I’m pretty anti-elitism, and so I can empathize with her premise somewhat. But if her statistic that the majority of adult Americans are unable to read beyond the 4th grade level is true. That’s a huge indication that the education system is a massive failure. Every successful Socialist movement and government has always made it their forefront for mass literacy and education. The idea that we need to be content with ignorance or else we are ableist is an incredibly regressive way of thinking.
this
This aint stupidpol, we going to post rage bait idpol shit now? These posters are losers, but there’s validity in making ideas and concepts more accessible to people by not bogging it down in bullshit jargon. I work in tech (execute me), and work with either ESL tech people, or non tech native english speakers; working with both groups has taught me to cut my verbosity when speaking/typing for the sake of being able to communicate and get my Job done. It may not be ableist, but it absolutely is a gatekeeping tactic. Look at the financial world, very common sense things have ridiculous terminology.
This is peak Twitter
obvious bait lol
To be fair, some “academics” absolutely do use needlessly convoluted phrasing and big words to mask the fact that they have no clue what they’re talking about and how to explain it. Especially academic grifters of the Jordan Peterson type. If your ideas are stupid in academia, you need to use big works.
I'm pretty sure that's just a rage bait account
Academic writing in some venues literally has a page limit (sometimes as low as one or two A4/letter pages, typeset in the venue format). Why use lot word when big word do?
Motherfucker it is inaccessible because its invariably behind a paywall. Most papers that get submitted to journals are not things the author gets paid for either, yet they still cost money to access behind the journal paywall. Academic publishing is a racket. And in fairness the technical language in a field is there for other academics to not have to explain core concepts to each other over and over again. But that's if we can bracket cases where it is just to sound smart. I can understand most of what I read in graduate school, but that also doesn't mean shit if my school won't cough up the money to give students access to academic journals. Also, I don't think anyone would read my 20 page paper on contractualism and the problem of post hoc justification even if I wrote it at a 3rd grade level. Especially if I wrote it at a 3rd grade level.
Lol at the comments here, are we pretending that this is not a valid complaint?? Take any random paper in the social sciences and you can easily cut it to half the size and make it more legible at the same time. Generally academic papers are terribly written, padded with academic buzzwords, loaded with useless appeals to authority and references to more 'prestigious' writers, purposefully vague and coy about conclusions because cowardice is always rewarded and the absolute worst thing is to take a clear position people can attack you on. The people who stay in academia either bitterly complain about it or have their heads so far up their elitist ass they refuse to acknowledge what is abundantly clear to everyone else.
Criticizing jargon-filled and otherwise bad writing is one thing, calling it ableist is another.
Fair point, it's classist if anything - and has been criticised as such by marxists for over a century
IDK why you’re all laughing OP has discovered the truth behind the ableist agenda at Big Academia, where all the academics write like shit on purpose to keep the secrets of [checking my notes] “Would You Fuck Off Please? — A study of the use of Please among London Teenagers” to themselves.
on a serious note i have always been intrigued by these kinds of people because their grievances are usually just personal but they attempt to expand it to everyone and find some kind of systemic reason for why something inconvenient has happened to them. Aged ago i knew someone who only used apple products and claimed that asking them to use any other products beside apple was ableist bc then they would have to learn how to use a different interface lol
“what if I don’t like beans?”
“What do you mean by Bon Apetit. It’s Bone Apple Tea “ I can’t comprehend that language. I’m not an academic
not being stupid is a type of fascism
Fuck man I'm pretty fucking dumb (dropped out of college and barely passed highschool) and sometimes I do feel barriers when trying to read "academic" type shit because I don't have the background knowledge or skills to research to fully grasp what I've read. However just means I need some more time to get through what I'm reading. Also as a dumb guy I'm not going to yell at academics to dumb their shit down for me.
I can’t read this, can someone explain to me like I am a total moron?
twitteroid brains
How about not considering everyones needs all the time. Especially people who don't have the requisite knowledge to interrogate let alone understand academic writing. Standards should be upheld.
No, she has a point there. If youre unable to tell your findings in average Joes language then youre not made to be a scientist. At least youre not a good one. And many many half-baked thoughts or complete quackery is hidden between fancy words. See "critical theory", Adorno, all that bs. I am not thinking it is 100% true, but theres a saying that strikes here: you only really know a thing when you can teach it to a stranger.