Deconstruction, and some weird stuff I'd never heard of

One of the weirder experiences I've had online is to come across a bunch of people discussing something I've never heard of, and they all seem to know about it, and assume that everyone else knows about it, and so see no need to explain it because they are unable to conceive of anyone not having heard about it.

I came across such a thing today -- some people were talking about deconstruction. Well, I have heard of deconstruction -- I've been hearing about it for the last 30 years or so. But these people were talking about it in a way that made no sense to me..It was sparked off by this tweet on Twitter:

Is "deconstruction" primarily a protestant experience, an evangelical experience, an American experience? I'm not suggesting there are no catholic/Anglican/Episcopal/Mainline/non-English-speaking people deconstructing, I'm just wondering if it is more the former?

It puzzled me because as far as I knew Jacques Derrida, the originator of deconstruction, was not American, but French and as far as I know he wasn't Protestant or Evangelical, and what did it matter anyway? Were there different denominational ways of doing deconstruction? I didn't think so. 

I've even written a journal article doing a bit of deconstruction: Sundkler deconstructed: Bethesda AICs and syncretism. Now I'm an Orthodox Christian and the text I was deconstructing was written by a Lutheran bishop, so perhaps that suggests that there might be different denominational varieties of deconstruction, but I didn't realise that that was so significant. 

But then the people twittering about deconstruction start talking about Fowler's stages 3 & 4. Fowler? I've heard of, and have a copy of Fowler's Modern English Eusage, but I don't recall him talking about deconstruction. I reread the article on deconstruction in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, but it's all Derrida, Derridqa, Derrida. I've seen Derrida and heard him speak, but Fowler? As Tom Lehrer says, "this I know from nothing."

Now if this was all in some field remote from my interests, it would not bother me. But they are talking about theology and liturgy and stuff like that. I have four degrees and a diploma in theology, it's my field! So how come I've never heard of it before today? And the people who are talking about it seem to assume that it is so well known as not to need any explanation -- just refer to Fowler Stages 3 & 4? I follow people on Twitter who mention theology among their interests, I participate on online discussions relating to theology. But this is entirely new to me. 

Now this has happened before. 

Some years earlier, when I started this blog, I did a search on bloggers' interests to see how many mentioned missiology, which happens to be my field. I found that about half the people who were interested in missiology were also interested in "emerging church", which I had never heard of. Search  engines were no help -- everything they took me to simply assumed that everyone who read them already knew what the "emerging church" was. Well, if you've never heard of the emerging church either, don't let it bother you -- it submerged again a few years later, leaving barely a ripple on the surface to show where it had been, but at the time it was quite big. 

But it was the same phenomenon: a bunch of people talking to each other online about something that they simply assumed everyone knew about, and thought needed no explanation. Better score, better deal.

Most misused words of 2008

List of Banished Words Released for 2009 | Firstcoastnews.com | Local News:

They're the words we used incorrectly, too often and sometimes for no good reason. Lake Superior State University has released its annual list of the 15 most misused, overused or generally useless words.

The words are submitted by the public and the school's faculty narrows the list to the fifteen most notorious. This year, a symbol made the cut.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace.

Among the overused words and phrases are are carbon footprint, icon and iconic, and I agree strongly with those choices.

Even after discovering what it was supposed to mean, for me carbon footprint still brings to mind the image of a trail of footprints in the coal dust in a coal yard.

Icon (so spelt) was skunked by Apple computers, who began using it for the little symbols on a computer screen about 25 years ago, so I have long used the spelling ikon for the real thing. A conservative blog for peace notes :

Just because a writer recognizes something does not make it an icon (a visual symbol or representation which inspires worship or veneration) or iconic. It just means that the writer has seen it before.

Other terms noted as being misused were maverick and bail out. Some, however, had escaped my notice, like monkey and staycation.

Stanislav Andreski dies

I was sorry to read of the death of Professor Stanislav Andreski, the Polish-British sociologist. As the obituary in The Independent reports:

Andreski always wrote a clear, impeccable and attractive English that was a pleasure to read. He held in contempt those social scientists who were obscurantists and jargon-mongers, and in 1974 published an attack on them in his best-selling Social Sciences as Sorcery. It was very popular with the public but infuriated those of his colleagues whose careers were based on concealing behind verbiage the fact that they had nothing to say. Andreski was equally contemptuous of bureaucracy and when he received an absurd questionnaire from the Social Science Research Council asking him what method he used, he replied "thinking".

In my later career as an editor of academic texts, I had reason to be grateful to Andreski for honing my bullshit detectors, as I was often (too often) called upon to edit texts by academics "whose careers were based on concealing behind verbiage the fact that they had nothing to say". There was even an entire discipline, Fundamental pedagogics, based on that principle.

One might not always agree with what Andreski said, but there was never any doubt about what he was saying. Here are some examples

One of the manifestations (unimportant in itself but very revealing) of the timorous but disingenuous humility characteristic of a burrowing apparatchik is the taboo on the word 'I'. 'One still shudders at the arrogance of the author in his repetitive use of the first singular concerning complex issues' - says a reviewer of one of my books, who for all I know may be the only creature in whom this obscene word can induce actual shudders, although by saying 'one' instead of 'I' he implies that most of his readers suffer from this allergy. I doubt whether the reviewer in question favours the majestic first plural normal among the older French writers, and still common among their successors, but which in England is reserved for the Queen. Presumably he prefers the anonymous 'it', and likes to see an expression like 'I think that ...' replaced by 'it is hypothesized ...', which, apart from expurgating the dirty word 'to think') ministers to the bureaucratic underling's predilection for submissive anonymity combined with oracular authority. I do not see why declaring that I - a mortal and fallible man but entitled to express his opinions - hold this or that view should be more arrogant than pretending to be the Voice of Science.

Andreski has some interesting things to say that relate to my own academic field, missiology and church history, when he says of the Great European witchhunt:

The Witch Craze did not spread to the lands of the Orthodox Church: neither Russia nor the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were affected. The ferocious persecution of the Old Believers in Russia was accompanied by no witch hunts - which provides another argument against the view that they were a by-product of a fight against heresies. The schism between the Eastern and Western Churches occurred before the celibacy of the clergy was established; and the Orthodox priests continued to marry. As the schism occurred several centuries before the demonisation of women had reached a high pitch in the West, the Eastern Church was not affected by this tradition, in contrast to the Protestant denominations.

Though I'm not sure that I altogether go along with his thesis of attributing the witch hunt to the introduction of syphilis from the New World, nor am I convinced of the truth of his assertion that Orthodox bishops were castrated.

Simpler, better, faster...

Simpler, better faster...

Some will remember that that was, until recently, the advertising slogan of the Standard Bank of South Africa.

But it seems that they realised that they couldn't deliver on their commitment to make banking "Simpler, better, faster...", and so, perhaps in a rush of honesty to the head, they acknowledged that they had just made it more involved.

And that was certainly the experience of their clients -- a few years ago you could go in to the bank, speak to the manager about a problem, and the manager would see to it that it was solved. But no one solves problems any more; they just address them or give them attention. That makes it "simpler" (for them, not for the customer), so you go in to discuss a problem but you don't get to see the manager, instead you see a "consultant" who knows zilch about solving problems (or even addressing them) but is trained to sell you "products" that you don't want and don't need. So from the customer's point of view the process is certainly more involved, because the "consultant" doesn't know how you can cancel your mortgage insurance once your mortgage has been paid off, and says you must contact someone else. So their new slogan is "Inspired, motivated, involved..." They are certainly inspired and motivated to make banking more involved.

And what were they thinking of when they began calling bank accounts and insurance policies "products"? One pictures them rolling off a production line and plopping into a bin and being taken in a lorry to be sold at corner cafes.

And bureaucratese and politician-speak are as bad as bizspeak. We are being swamped by a tsunami of jargon and buzz words.

I hope that when they've finished moving the goalposts and levelling the playing fields we'll be ready for the World Cup in 2010, but I wonder if it will happen by the end of the decade because it certainly won't be by the end of the day.

And they're always putting initiatives in place -- somewhere on a shelf in a locked strongroom where they'll never see the light of day, much less be implemented.

And computer geekspeak is even worse.

I'm longing for the day when I can once again buy an unenhanced keyboard, with the function keys on the left, where they made typing simpler, better faster...