I have to confess to an addiction to Gobbledygook. This disease was acquired partly during my far-off days as a lawyer, when I used to spend time trying to encourage our lawyers to use plain English and avoid our version of gobbledygook. But legal gobbledygook reads like Enid Blyton compared with the modern Woke version.
I found myself reflecting on this during the festive season because of a brilliant article in my favourite newspaper the Daily Sceptic (founded and edited by Toby Young, who despite all his heresies is being made a Lord - congratulations, Toby! he must be as surprised as I am). The article was in the 21 December issue and was by Steven Tucker.
PhD on smells
A young person, who I will not name, has got a PhD from Cambridge University, no less, for her study of what she (oops, I’ve disclosed her sex) describes as “Olfactory Ethics - the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”. I would love to think that the thesis contains profound insights, but we can only see an absract, which is what caught my attention. It has also caught the attention of 100 million others - yes, 100 million - via Twitter/X, one of whom summarises it as saying: “If you say someone stinks, people like them (sic) less”.
Woke lingo
One could go mad trying to work out whether there are any truths buried in the thesis, but it’s the language that fascinates me. Let me quote from it:
“My thesis is particularly attentive to tensions and ambivalences that complicate the typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences, drawing attention to (dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility”.
As Mr Tucker says, what the Foucault does that mean? Tucker has a way with words. He talks about the need in today’s academic circles to speak the “lingua wanka”. And one of his subheadings refers, naughtily, to “Cunning linguists”.
Why?
But I have a simple question: Why is it that people find the need to say things in language that obscures what they want to say?
In the case of lawyers, non-lawyers often say that the reason is to make it seem that the law is more complicated than it is. Don’t try and do it yourselves. Keep coming to us and paying our fees. I was always sceptical about this reasoning, but all this academic obfuscation makes me wonder if there isn’t a tiny element of truth in it.
Applied to academics, they must be motivated to make their labours seem more profound than they might otherwise appear - than they might appear if expressed in plain English.
Tucker goes further than this and worries that it may be impossible to get a PhD these days unless you can write in the woke language that is one of the favoured languages of today’s governing class. But let’s not go down there at Christmas time. As I think Sherlock Holmes once observed, “These are murky waters, my dear Watson”.
Let’s just note Tucker’s comment: “Beware of Geeks bearing Qualifications!” Ged-it?
And a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!
Tony Herbert
24 December 2024
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