If you care about clear writing, and if you are concerned about how advertisers, political spin doctors, and the media are degrading the English language, then you might be interested in Ken Smith's new book, Junk English. "Junk English," as Smith defines it, "is more than just sloppy grammar. It is a hash of human frailties and cultural license: spurning the language of the educated yet spawning its own pretentious words and phrases, favoring appearance over substance, broadness over precision, and loudness above all. It is sometimes innocent, sometimes lazy, sometimes well intended, but most often it is a trick we play on ourselves to make the unremarkable seem important." A sort of cranky contemporary tribute to Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," Junk English is an alphabetical catalogue of many--but not all--of the lame usages, inflated phrasings, and hollow terms that currently bloat the language. Some fun ones: fat-ass phrases ("on a daily basis" for "daily," "the thought process" for "thinking," "the political arena" for "politics"), self-help jargon ("validate," "assertiveness," "comfort level," "dysfunctional," "internalize," "challenged"), cheapened words ("revolutionary," "unique," "masterpiece," "crisis"), parasitic intensifiers ("substantial growth," "highly nutritious," "valuable insight," "absolutely true"), -ize verbs ("concretize," "marginalize," "conceptualize," "unionize," "problematize"), lack of will (using "can," "could," "may," "might," or "should" for will). There are more, many, many more, but you get the idea.

I saw Smith talk last night at Borders, and what struck me as I listened to him enumerate styles of junk English drawn from advertisements, corporatese, and political soundbytes, is that he was--perhaps politely, perhaps innocently--exempting from his junk hit list one of the worst scenes of junk English around: academic discourse (the phrase itself announces the pompous bloat that is synonymous with so much contemporary scholarly writing).

Consider the category of cheapened words. Leftist academics have almost singlehandedly destroyed words like "political," "ideology," "subvert," "interrogate," "transgress," and "radical," which appear in their writing so often, in so many guises, and mean so very little so very vaguely, that they might as well not be there at all.

Or consider -ize verbs. If academics couldn't "problematize," "reconceptualize," "materialize," "dematerialize," "legitimize," and "theorize," they would be paralyzed.

Re-verbs, another of Smith's favorite categories, are a source of endless possibility for academics, who "reimagine," "rethink" "renegotiate, " and "reconceptualize" so assiduously that they have actually "reinvented" the language. Did you know you can "re-member the body"? Or that you can "revision" race, class, and gender? Well, you can, as long as you are doing it as part of a re(de)constructive or re-presentational critique that avoids reproducing restrictive rhetorical relations.

And where would academe be without its smears? Words like "racist," "sexist," "patriarchal," "classist," "hegemonic," "homophobic," "corporate," "conservative," "reactionary," "essentialist," "imperialist," "misogynist," and "apolitical" do more than their fair share of labor in writing that claims to be based on reasoned analysis rather than knee-jerk reaction. Labelling is the intellectual's namecalling: it objectifies complex concepts and situations in such a way that the writer can dismiss them instead of engaging with them. Case in point: just last week this very blog was called "reactionary" and "dysfunctional" by a fellow academic who disliked its comments on graduate student unions. Needless to say, the smearer did not bother to explain what exactly it was about those comments that warranted such labels. The labels themselves excused their author from responsibility for explaining himself--that is their beauty. Academics appreciate the power of the smear to ease the difficulties of substantive engagement, and make excellent, extensive use of it when they are resisting, reimagining, reconfiguring, or, as sometimes happens, regurgitating oppressive hegemonic formations, discourses of power, ideological cathexes, and other fat-ass phrases.

During the question session, someone asked Smith whether he thought we would eventually burn out and return to good, solid, standard communicative English. Smith--a hopeful man, and one who is eager to please--said that he thought we would have to do that eventually, that there was only so far junk English could go before it was all junked out. But I wonder if we aren't losing both our ability to use good English and our understanding of why it's important to do so. English professors positively revel in junk English. It is a sign of their intellectual sophistication (only the initiated can understand it--or can pretend to understand it). And it is a sign of their political awareness (clear expression is an ideological ruse; convoluted expression acknowledges the political struggle built into all oppositional acts). Those who do not talk the talk are labelled "unsophisticated," "atheoretical," and even--here it comes again--"reactionary." This is the logic of a group that would rather rationalize its own functional illiteracy than accept responsibility for learning to express itself clearly and--even more to the point--for teaching its students to do the same. Junk English in English is a sign not only of the language's endangerment, but of the failure of those who are entrusted with its future to know that their most important work is the work of communication, and to honor that covenant with the respect and care it deserves.