The Intellectual Scourge of Earth.
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“indeed, we both continue to present this image, though useage of our superb nomenclature. Pehaps we'll have intreging conversation on nothing,”
-Jackson Parker (MSN racket)

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The reason I am writing this article is to help us become more aware of the world we live in. It has come to many people’s attention that the Internet community, Facebook, has been selling all our information to third party recipients. The people running the site were able to make a large amount of money by tricking people into voluntarily handing over information as personal as friendships to corporate giants.

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It is a simple exercise in rewording a well-established book that is defeating our human minds. That is to say, we are wasting our time reading intellectual garbage that is impossible to dissect and even more difficult to translate into understandable terms. We all have read these documents, whether it is some terms of use agreement hiding a third party informational sales agreement or simply an inbred Bourgeoisie hiding his lack of motivation and skills behind troubling words. This form of writing has been around for as long as literature itself. For as long as there have been class structures to maintain, self-righteous, overeducated professors have been reiterating common themes and ideas in difficult to understand ways.

So, I was thinking aloud and stomping about my flat, debating the merits of the nature of my existence. I tend to understand this sort of writing by filtering out the useless, pointless and redundant phrases. This makes me an intellectual sophisticate in training, I assume, but I will not go down without a fight. I’ve tried to ignore my self righteous garble about the erroneous use of enormous words and find myself mixing another cup of black coffee. An album I do not enjoy was spinning around the turntable, but as Fleetwood Mac runs quickly out of steam I decide to finally write this piece.

Intellectualism is the curse of the upper echelons of urban society. Education is a wonderful thing; it allows one to regurgitate cumbersome variations of simplified, basic philosophical ideas. It is the idea I acquired from Noam Chomsky on a blissful summer day at a music festival. Paraphrased, Chomsky wrote that one does not need to know anything or break new ground to be a highly respected intellectual thinker. Academic writing is simply an exercise in redundancy, an assignment in which you find who the audience is and state their opinions in a difficult to read manor. We have all seen documents that prove this form of writing is transparent.

It is those writers who attempt to be respected through this uninspired work that should be addressed with this simple theory: If you are writing by using words only useful for confusing the reader, you have nothing to say. You are trying to weasel your way into respectability by alluding to your wisdom and educational track-marks by using phrases and thoughts that you do not understand. If you understood what it is that you were attempting to write you could do so in plain English, without the extensive thesaurus hopping.

I have found a simple formula to find if an article, book or essay is useless. If I cannot understand it I attempt to translate the words into readable English. This is done with the use of a brain or a thesaurus. Words such as “Erroneous” can be translated simply as “Wrong.” This use of language is an easy way to confuse a simpler reader enough to scare him from the passage and place the writer on a pedestal above his assumed grasp of literature. It is a simple way to sound smart, when nothing is being said. Many have read this as the language of the learned, but it is the polar opposite.

This mockery of insecure socialite rhetoric serves very little purpose besides allowing the few able literate fellows another topic to argue. The reason for pursuing a topic as broad as this is to pull away those who are misfortunate enough to believe that redundant overuse of superfluous adjectives is another word for being smart. It is a mockery of language to use these phrases and draw from unnecessary philosophical questions in relation to simple, every day ideas.

This is a common trend when the writer is generally unaware of what the writing assignment is or is genuinely apathetic about the quality of the piece. This is the work of a writer who knows very little besides previously declared ideas and is working at filling space on a page, not a breakthrough in thought provoking material. Even though this style of writing is frowned upon and we are taught to avoid it at all costs it is far too simple to slip through the school system with obscure ramblings unchecked.

One can say more in simple terms than in obscure phrases and therefore we should be aware of these devices. Confusing terms are often intentionally placed in documents for less than noble reasons, whether it is to sound wiser or to confuse a reader into signing his bank information over to a wolf-like businessman.