odified product or service is so widely available that pricing is difficult to maintain. When too many similar products are on the market, commodification occurs. Academics don’t limit themselves to clear meanings. Commodification has been appropriated to mean cheapen.
... I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but as a grotesque debasement of Standard Written English, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherences of Presidental English... or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak ... and in support of this utter contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had Academic English pegged as a "mixture of vaguemess and sheer incompetence" in which "it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
– Harper’s Magazine, April 2001
community - (buzzword) any group, even if there seems to be limited connections among members. This is a buzzword in the humanities, rendered meaningless via overuse. If you thought you knew what a community was, you haven’t read an academic paper. Entire books have been written trying to define community.
“Community is descriptive and prescriptive, local and global, spatially bound or boundaryless, public or private, organic or mechanical, intentional or accidental, purposive or aimless, oppressive or liberating, functional or dysfunctional…” (Fernback 2007)
Community means too many things.
concretizing - (1) to give an example. (2) to convert a plan into actions. People understand giving a “concrete example,” but simplify to “example” in most cases.
conflict transformation - (1) to end a conflict. (2) to change a conflict from physical to intellectual… though most physical conflicts begin with differences in thought.
conflictual - having to do with conflict. This word could be confused with others because it is uncommon.
counter-hegemonic - (buzzword) challenging norms or authority. see hegemony
counterpublics - any group opposed to dominant ideas or norms. In academia, counterpublic generally applies to “left-leaning” groups with “social justice” agendas.
deconstruction / deconstructing - (misused, buzzword) traditionally, deconstruction is an approach to philosophy. Academics appropriate terms from other disciplines, sometimes with odd results. Unfortunately, everything is now “desconstructed” by humanities professors. Understand a term before using it.
delegitimated - use delegitimize in most cases.
discourse community - (buzzword) in composition and rhetoric, this phrase is applied to any group communicating internally. We would use this phrase only to describe groups of academics, for clarity. Unfortunately, this can be every “community” the humanities have defined. see community
discursive - (misused) (1) based on reason rather than intuition. (2) rambling, digressive, wandering from one topic to another. Misused as a synonym for explanatory.
discursive strategy - how one writes or speaks. This is a fine phrase, when used sparingly.
“He employed an unconscious discursive strategy when conducting public discourse.”
He used proper English when delivering a public speech.
disempowering - (buzzword) (1) oppressing, dominating. (2) anything that reduces one’s standing. (3) making dependent on others for success or survival. We suggest rewriting any sentence with this buzzword to clarify what is being done and to whom.
enculturation / enculturalization - the slow acquisition of the traits of one culture by another. The term enculturation is misued to imply forcing one culture’s norms upon another culture. Enculturation leads to hegemony in critical theory. These terms are associated with Western Marxism.
essentialized / essentializing -
existential - (misused, buzzword) dealing with the nature of humanity, especially matters of free will and self-determination within an apparently absurd universe. Overused in both academic and popular writing. As with deconstruction, philosophical terms resist simple definitions.
extra-institutional - (buzzword) beyond the “official” campus realm.
feministing