Are you wondering why I have given such a title to the blog today? Oh, no, do not you worry, no reference whatsoever to the climate. Rather it is a Shakespearean quote that I feel is an apt metaphor for a way of expressing ideas, for instance.
Have you attended literary seminars? No? Well, some, in fact, many, of those hallowed events have celebrated speakers who use such bombastic language that often the argument underneath is zilch, while the heavily terminology enriched (or is it really challenged?) verbiage bandying oh-so-must- be used critical terms pretends to create an aura of greatness around the speaker.
Is such mode of communication innocent? I would not really know. Most often, it is elitist affectation, extremely exclusionary, while the oh-so-learned speaker goes blah, blah, blah about not much really, while all along pretending how intelligent, intellectual and democratic he/she is. At times, it appears to have a kind of shock value the way certain exploitative practices in medicine would bandy terms that 'obfuscate', one of the favourite lit crit terms in certain contexts!
True, certain concepts are complex, and may require slightly dense language. Yet if a sentence has at least four multi-syllabic or polysyllabic words that can be understood only by a mutually back scratching mafia of experts, I suppose, such a communication is exclusionary, despite the much touted democratic blah, blah, blah kind of speaker-ly pretences.
Most often, personally, I find such "grand" diction plain amusing. Yet when one remembers the great Orwell on the politics of language use, one has to grant that the underlying coterie clique-ing could be downright dangerous. Well each to his/her own! Hope one day there would be many seminar papers that neither simplify nor use high-funda jargon that hardly conveys much!
Pratima@literature, said Pope, is "what was oft thought/but never so well expressed". True of all good writing!
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