Diesel Librarian translates Academiaspeak

Diesel Librarian has a very funny post on academic jargon on his blog. I'm glad he included a translation.

You know, I love academia as much as the next person, but sometimes it takes itself a little too seriously. Sometimes, it is straight talking out of its ass, as in the case below. What we have here is a conference invitation that a friend of mine recently received via email. I laughed when I first read it because it was so over-the-top in its theoryspeak. Just for fun, I have taken the email and paraphrased it in plain English for the edification of all.

TheorySpeak: "Interdisciplinarity draws its strength from the ontological view that reality may be explained from various different angles that permit interpretation of phenomena in a more complete way without becoming mere eclecticism. From an epistemological point of view, interdisciplinarity attempts to unify the field of action of the disciplines that study social facts and phenomena. It has no intention of achieving a priori integration of the paradigms of knowledge. Rather, its efforts are aimed at the enrichment and rational exchanging of the methods of various disciplines, to some extent independently of the categories specific to each science, in order to improve study of reality."

Translation: “There’s more than one way of looking at the world. These points of view may or may not complement each other, but since there’s no way to really prove anything, all we can do is get together and talk about the different ways we academics maintain our job security through the creation of elaborate and contrived jargons. Maybe our jargons will overlap somewhat, thereby giving us more than a snowball’s chance in hell of actually figuring something out about the world.

Read the rest here.