DrBoost wrote:
Basil Exposition wrote:
I work in the financial sector and there's one guy in my office who uses "space" for everything related to an industry or a subset of an industry. "The healthcare space, the automotive space, the hospitality space, the exploration and production space in the oil space." God help me, but I'm beginning to understand physical assault and murder in the "white collar space."
I was going to mention this, but I thought I was sounding petty enough already haha. Yeah, here at work they'll talk about being competitive in the automotive space, the mining space, or the off-highway space. I'm thinking about using tape and marking off spaces on the carpet and labeling them "automotive", "mining", and the like. And I agree, it's the result of people trying to sound intelligent. I don't care to **sound** intelligent, I'd rather be viewed **as** intelligent.
I had a professor explain that phenomenon to me in academia, and I have since learned other reasons why people talk/write like that.
1- trying to intimidate others with knowledge. The general idea is that "I can understand this all, I said it. If you can't understand it, it means you aren't as smart or deep or insightful as me". What this actually means, likely, is that "I don't really know what i'm talking about, because if I did, I could explain it clearly using words that everybody understands." Intellectual elitism is alive and well, one way to keep it unreachable by 'lesser' minds is by encoding it in buzzwords nobody cares to learn, because they already have their own way of discussing things that makes perfect sense to them. In a sense, it's either to try to look smarter (as you have mentioned), or because they don't actually understand it well enough to explain it properly (oddly enough this is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to prove). This can be particularly infuriating to other academics, because so much is meant to be applied to society. That's kind of the point. Why bother figuring out how biology works if you aren't going to use it to improve medicine or the environment or something? It can't be applied to anything if the society doesn't know what the hell you're saying, thus making everything you say worthless. This may not apply to a guy overusing the term space, but it is similar to the BS word usage.
2- Old terminology being replaced by new, less problematic terminology. In anthropology we hit on this a lot, like the term "Race". The problems with that term can, has, and continues to fill books. For a long time it was thrown out as a genetic idea, taken only as socially constructed, but now is coming back in a whole different way (biological in addition to social, but not necessarily genetic. Genes don't account for all biological variation). If we just used the same word (Race), people who didn't care to read all up on it would think of it in the old, problematic ways with genetic determinism, bounded categories, and hierarchies and all that crap, even though race is exactly what is being talked about.
3- Getting people to think things through. Sortof like #1, but with purpose. Have you ever read anything by Homi Bhabha? Pierre Bourdieu? It's infuriatingly poorly worded. Granted, some of that is translation issues, but some isn't. If you take the time to think through it, decipher the wording complexity used to describe not super complicated ideas, you'll understand them inside and out. Again, not sure how this applies to your example. I also hate this. A lot.
4- Career building. Come up with more evidence to prove someone else's point? Good for you. Come up with your own new way of talking about stuff with new words or word usages? EVERYBODY has to reference you for them from now on. Career building. Doesn't really apply outside of academia, but it's a reason for new words/uses. It doesn't help out much, but it gets attention.
It's very annoying. Just say what you mean, simply and clearly.
