I agree that
the tone on this list sometimes becomes counter productive, but I only think
this happens when people start to personalise the issues expressed on this list.
I think it useful for ideas to be shaken around a bit and pulled apart, but not
list members. Ideas are concepts, so we don't have to worry about how they feel.
Given I don't think we are wanting this list to be a simulacrum of
facebook (maybe I am wrong on this), I think it's okay to stick to discussing
ideas rather than the discussants who express them. We have very few public
places left where we can engage in public, social issues without the worry
that they will be turned into private, personal issues - biographies replacing
socio-political commentaries. E.g., I think positive psychology is one stinking
heap of cow dung and I would like to be able to say so on this list without
worring about any positive psychologists on this list anxiously smelling their
own armpits as a result.
I am less
sympathetic to the 'keep it in plain english' approach to dissemination. I think
it depends upon the context. I think that when speaking to a large group of
people it is important to use language that can be understood (particulalry when
we are speaking through a translator or when there are other specific language
issues). When talking one to one I think this is less a problem because I'd hope
the the exchange would be a conversation that would allow each speaker to
clarify what the other has said, but I concede that it is still an issue because
the words are spoken rather than written. In written scholary work I think it is
less of a problem. While I would not think it appropriate to write a user
manual for an DVD player using post structuralist theory (though sometimes
I think that it might make as much sense to me) I don't see why all scholary
texts should be written in 'plain english' (whatever that means). Texts have to
be worked at. Why should a reader expect to skim read an article and have all
the knowledge seep into their brain by an almost imperceptable process of
osmosis? Studying academic texts can be hard work, what is wrong with that? I
don't mind that sometimes I come across a book that I have to read, then
re-read, then ruminate on for a while, then read again, then ask someone else if
they understand what it means: I don't mind that I end up engaged in a lot of
page curling and book hurling until I start to 'get it'. In fact, the
impenetrability of some texts encourages me to check out my understandings of it
with others. I am not so enthusiastic about teflon publishing where knowledge
just slips straight off the page and into your brain, I think some of the best
texts need a bit of digging and scraping to get the best out of them. I know
this will sound a wee bit harsh but... if you don't understand some of the
words, buy a dictionary! By the way, my own vocabularly is poor and I
regularly mangle the english language in ways that would make Shakespeare's toes
curl. However, I will not stop trying to use language skillfully and make full
use of the full vocabularly that history has bequethed us. Some say knowledge is
power, well, language is moreso. Someone once said that knowledge is like food -
you need to chew it around a bit if you want to get the nourishment from it but
without good language skills and a broad vocabulary, you might find that all you
end up chewing tastes like boiled tofu (no offence meant to the veggies on the
list).
More
generally I think that it is a mistake to think that we shoudl place greater
importance on trying to be understood rather than trying to avoid being
misunderstood. Sometimes,, the latter requires that we use esoteric words that
have very specific meanings in very particular contexts, indeed are locked into
those contexts, rather than words that can mean anything, to anyone,
anytime anywhere.
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