A Waste Of Ten Dollar Words

July 19th, 2006 · No Comments
by Booksquare

Yesterday, an associate noted that people often use a lot of words when they are trying to make themselves look smart. People also adopt stultifying, faux high-brow tones when trying to make themselves look smart. Nothing says, “I’m an intellectual and I’m okay” like cardboard toast writing.

For those of you who have been wondering how long we would have lasted in the world of academia, you have your answer.

We have found there is nothing less exciting than wasting our time reading about literature. Not reviews — we generally enjoy those, to a point. It’s the slicing and dicing of the works until they have been re-imagined as something more than a what they are. Perhaps Dracula is a paean to auto-eroticism and we simply missed the sub-text; it’s hard to say. We

were, uh, enjoying the story, meaning we didn’t take special note of the themes:

“I will explore both the physical and psychological autoerotic imagery with which the novel suppresses, in light of that taboo, the masturbatory endeavour pursued by Dracula’s vampire-fighting crew of men – our, by way of physical allegory, manly Band of the Hand.”

You try copying and pasting that sentence with a straight face. It was described, by one far wiser than we’ll ever be, as a load of wank. Yeah, we can appreciate the worst in puns with great enthusiasm. It is the simple pleasures that keep us going.

We understand the importance of publish-or-perish (okay, we don’t because, frankly, we figure rules are there to be broken), but, people, try to have fun with this stuff. Nobody curls up on the couch to engage in a little “… experimental staging of … ambivalence.”* They open a book for the sheer pleasure of reading. Either you pick up the book or you don’t. If you’ve spent five years in a state of ambivalence, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to turn to Emily Dickinson.

Special thanks to Brenda Coulter, who provided us with this source of amusement.

* – In our spare time, we are practicing writing quotes for book covers. We are particularly taken at this point with creative uses of ellipses.

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