9.02.2008

Word List, cont.

Love my lit class, but it's a treasure trove of overused jargon . . .

11. synchronicity
12. intertextuality
13. otherness

To be continued, I'm sure.

Confidential to Tom: Keep your pants on (or not, as you wish). The limerick contest winner will be announced when I'm darned ready. Yes, I'm crabby today.

8 comments:

deb said...

OK, I'm done with synchronicity, and I never even started with intertextuality. But I'm loyal to otherness. It's useful and still has meaning in my world.

I would like to post the new phrase that I heard come out of my mouth earlier today:

Interdisciplinary bandwidth.

I think I made it up, and I'd like credit for it. Where better than here to claim my prize? I already know I get a jargon triple-score for it, so you don't have to cringe in secret. You can cringe right in front of me.

Anonymous said...

I think this would make a great drinking game. I'll have to figure out the rules, but it will quickly get sloppy, because I'm chock-full of lit-crit bullsh*t.

Have you run into the kissin' cousin of "otherness"? This one was big at Princeton: alterity

Oh, those were the days...

deb said...

PS I am a graduate of a practical, vocationally-focused program at a land-grant college in the Midwest.

Stephanie said...

Last night, before any of these comments were posted, I was trying to come up with some clever comment about how Scott should thank his lucky stars that the word is "otherness" instead of "otherality". Now, I'm going to claim that my thought waves crossed the Atlantic and half the North American continent (I think I was probably using interdisciplinary bandwidth) and inspired both Deb and Sean to write separate posts on otherness and alterality, which are clearly the parents of my newly invented word.

Anonymous said...

Here's another good one:

Imbricating: a fancy-pants way of saying "overlapping"

As in "Deb, Stephanie and Sean offered an imbricating"selection of words that ought to be forever banned."

Oooh, I love this game!

Anonymous said...

How about adding iterative to the list? I can still hear my music history prof. talking about just about everything as an iterative process. I think sex was an iterative process for her. But then again, this was the same woman who treated stuffed animals as her own children.

Interdisciplinary bandwidth? Is that sort of like multitasking? Does your iPhone have as much interdisciplinary bandwidth as Scott's?

Finally, I shall keep my pants on or take them off as I please. But hurry up, damn it! :)

PS - Want to go running? We still haven't done that and your big day's only a month off.

Anonymous said...

Um. . .

I like the iterativity of sex. . .

Anonymous said...

Despite the Scooter-umbrage, I still plan to teach my students "Other" and "intertextuality" this year. After all, to be part of a group (i.e. literature analyzers), you need to know the jargon. Does it count as "overused" when people are hearing it for the first time?

Here's a phrase that may show up in my students' blogs tonight on similar lists of problematical (there's an annoying one) language: metacognitive reflection. Talk about redundant! Thinking about thinking about thinking. What was I thinking?

Ann