Just the Right Word

Do you want to go to graduate school?  Great.  Start by learning vocabulary.  Last night I attended a delightful and interesting conversation at Columbia on “pluralism.”  The evening’s facilitator was an NYU sociology professor who did a respectable job of framing the discussion.  But for such a smart person, he was excruciatingly difficult to listen to.  He talked in a halting, staccato manner, often struggling as he searched for just the right word.  The same was true of the legal scholars, sociologists, historians, and scholars of religion that formed the panel.

I finished a Ph.D. six long years ago and have worked in non-academic fields in the years since.  So I’ve been forced to slowly unlearn this way of speaking.  (It's kind of contagious in humanities departments).  I had forgotten that the academic guild has such distinctive speech patterns.  When I heard the word “hybridity” less than a minute in, I chuckled.  When I heard the term “elide” for the second or third time, I figured I should start writing them down.   

pluralism.  hybridity.  regime.  practices.  domain.  difference.  legitimacy.  faith communities.  genealogy.  empire.  imbricated.  agenda.  orthodoxy.  heterodoxy.  doxic.  others.  overlapping.  identities.  mixing.  coupling.  articulate.  boundaries.  nation states.  limits.  performance.  performative.  discursive.  normativity.  multiply embedded.  legal constructs.  belonging.  system.  phenomenological.  horizon.  category.  exclusion.  constitutive.  authenticity.  regulated.  provincialized.  sovereignty.  impermeability.  proliferation.  discourses.  dystopian.  homogenization.  disjunctive.  belied.  rhetoric.  inclusion.  underwriting.  americanness.  nationalist.  heterogeneity.  project.  erasure.  iterations.  judaeo-christian.  coalition.  marginalized.  alliances.  elided.  subsequent.  differentiation.  evocative.  hierarchical.  unstable.  mughal.  ottoman.  fixed.  autonomous.  liberal democracy.  provocative.  indefinite.  destabilized.  status quo.  categorical distinctions.  problematic.  abet.  slippage.  playing one off another.  power structures. narrative.  accommodation.  non-conflictual.  crystallization.  subverted.  always already subverted.  tension.  problematization.  dominant.  plausible.  monistic.  rhetorical field.  unfreedoms.  multiculturalism.  anarchy.  discourse.  secularism.  over-determined.  relativism.  operationally.  vis-a-vis.  ensconced.  embody.  inequitable.  toleration.  notwithstanding.  structures.  equivalences.  relation.  commonality.  index.  construction.  formulations.  refutation.  speculative.  mode.  co-existence.  conventional.  constraint.  critique.  shared grid.  cohabitation.  mutuality.  legal framework.  juxtaposition.  diversity.  recuperation.  institutions.  freighted.  inauthentic.  reformulation.  predispositions.  theatrical.

My personal favorites: always already subverted, elide, slippage, imbricated, iterations, and doxic.  I’ve got a quarter if you can use them all in one sentence.