It will come as no great shock to the readers of Civil Beat, that the campuses of major research universities in America are knee-deep in BS.  Since the folks at the Carnegie Foundation who classify these matters consider the University of Hawaii at Manoa to be a “Tier I Research University” … well, as they say, “if the rubber slipper fits, wear it.”

A researcher named Gordon Pennycook at the University of Waterloo in Canada found that if you string together enough important sounding words, a lot of people will either be afraid to object or will actually believe that you must have said something so profound that it would be embarrassing to ask what it meant.

Weʻre not talking about “political correctness” here, although PC and BS are cousins if not siblings. Weʻre talking about what those of us who are interested in the way people write and speak sometimes call “hieratical language.” The original meaning is “priestly talk.”

When I was a kid, my friends who went to Saint Stanislaus in Chicago would make fun of Father Casimir by saying “hocus-pocus-dominocus” and cross themselves before showing their hand when we played five-card stud after school.  It sounded like Latin, but it never worked. Four spades and a club still didn’t make a flush.

However, rare is the graduate student nowadays, who dares write a paper in social science or the humanities without ornamenting it with some line of jargon from Foucauld or Derrida.  And when referring to connected speech, never use  words like “talk,” ”conversation,” “debate,” or “dialogue,” when you can use “discourse” – thatʻs the rule if you want a good grade, especially if your instructor’s field is focused on what leading scholar A said about Bʻs critique of C who was essentially dealing with “qualitative research,” which means talking about yourself. Vacuous solipsism has to be dressed up in order to pass academic inspection.

This is because in American universities for the past several decades, the primary source of hocus-pocus has been Post-Modernism. For the most part, PM came to America across the Atlantic from France – no surprise, since feasting on the crumbs left over on the French intellectual table has been a trend that has endured since the Elightenment.

At the UH, Emeritus Professor George Simson, the founder of the Center for Biographical Research, calls this “-ivity/-avity” because a lot of the impressive words used end in “-ity.”

I one wrote an essay on Babar the Elephant as an avatar of colonialism in which I was tempted to use the words “pachydermicity” (the quality of being elephant-like, i.e., “big”) and “pachydermivity” (behaving like an elephant, i.e., “acting big”) in order to tweak the editors, but I thought better of it in the end.

Linguists have long toyed with sentences, such as Chomskyʻs “colorless green dreams sleep furiously,” and they knew these were nonsense because they were designed to be such for purposes of grammatical analysis.

But what are we supposed to do when students quote something like Deepak Chopra’s equally nonsensical “nature is a self-regulating ecosystem of awareness?” The only honest answer is call them on it – require them to explain what is meant and donʻt accept jargon as a substitute for clear sequential English or give them a free ride because you feel they need to overcome some social challenge.

Most students don’t like to be confronted and a lot of professors like it even less. But we’re not doing our jobs unless we stand up and exercise judgment: “I donʻt understand what you mean – canʻt you say that in simple words?”