Saturday, June 02, 2007

Scary Academic Jargon

Thank you to NP at Rough Theory for pointing me to this website, a generator of random academic jargon sentences. It is terrifyingly good at them, presumably because the programmers involved (it comes from the University of Chicago) had lots of exposure to sample data from their colleagues! Here's the one it gave me:

Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:
The socialization of post-Foucaultian sexuality (re)embodies the discourse of process.

Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:
Pootwattle's wide-ranging study of the relationship between the socialization of post-Foucaultian sexuality and the discourse of process reformulates the underlying problems to which my own work points, thus raising other, more important issues.

But Smedley, Smedley, you missed a chance. As stands, it's ambiguous whose issues are more important, yours or Pootwattle's. It would take only a small modification of your sentence to decisively dismiss Pootwattle's wide-ranging study in favor of your own more important one...

Oooh lord, and just one more: this one is actually scarily sensible...

Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:
The renunciation of disciplinary boundaries should suggest the epistemology of structural identity.

...especially if he had used "could well have an impact on" as the verb instead...

2 comments:

Andrea said...

i had one professor, one only, who would have seen through this kind of bull. one. isn't that frightening?

ZaPaper said...

Yeah, but the more frightening thing is when this kind of stuff starts to make sense... even though you know it was randomly generated. That's when you start to worry that maybe anything can mean anything and we might as well give up trying to communicate.