JISCMail - COMMUNITYPSYCHUK Archives

Sorry - can't help being personal, because Paul, I LOVE the way you 'regularly-mangle-the-English-language'.

I also agree with most of what you say - about trying to keep discussing ideas without people feeling like they have been personally attacked, and about having to work to understand texts. At the same time, for me this sometimes ultimately means I will never get to grips with some stuff - Foucault, for example, I just couldn't do it, no matter how hard I worked. That's okay though - there's more ways of knowing than just being able to understand heavy academic texts and you don't always need good language skills to know stuff...

----- Original Message -----

From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:Paul@home">Paul@home

To: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]

Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 1:34 AM

Subject: Re: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] ACP new issue

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.