smart moves for style and clarity

The dictionary reveals that the origin of the word hoax is the verb hocus, which means befuddling someone with strong liquor. That's the same hocus in hocus pocus, the magician’s incantation.
 

Of course, some writers have also been known to use a little — or a lot — of hocus pocus. An example is those who use empty intellectual pomp, although some of these writers succeed in beguiling readers — and sometimes themselves — into thinking that their thoughts are serious, even profound. 

Let’s look at a parody of such writing that received high praise, even from a leading university, until the moment that the hoaxer fessed up. 

The example is a 1996 article with the grand title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Written by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, it is a spoof that sported the trendy vocabulary of cultural studies yoked to physics and padded with more than a hundred footnotes. 

Here's an excerpt with lots of baloney about “existence” and “objective reality”:                           
 

     “Here my aim is to carry deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent

      developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s

      quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity  are at once synthesized and superseded. In

      quantum gravity, as we shall  see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective reality;

      geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior

      science – among them, existence itself – become problematized and relativized.”                                                                
 

Whew! 

Note the author’s long sentences and pairs of stylishly abstract terms like relational and contextual, problematized and relativized, foundational and conceptual, and the splendid dash of alliteration in synthesized and superseded. Precious!

But it's all pseudo-scholarly nonsense. Sokal later revealed the joke, but not before the article had been published by Duke University’s journal Social Text, whose editors received the so-called "Ig Nobel Prize" for “eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.” 

Highbrow gibberish enchants our gullibility. Be on guard, both as reader and writer.  Ω

Want to comment on this post?  Click here.

Related article  For more examples of pompous writing (and another illustrative animal photo!), read How to BS Like a Pro.