"An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another"
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A whole ecosystem of prestige hides in that word perfected. Cooley is needling the way academic language can become less a tool for thinking than a self-sealing costume for authority: the dialect reaches “perfection” precisely when it stops pointing outward and starts circling itself like a closed circuit. “Hard to understand” isn’t just a complaint about obscurity; it’s a description of a gatekeeping technology. If the terms are difficult, outsiders are kept outside. If the terms “refer only to one another,” insiders can keep playing the game without ever cashing out into the messy world of evidence, lived experience, or accountability.
The line works because it’s structured like an indictment disguised as a technical definition. Cooley doesn’t argue that academic language sometimes gets insular; he offers a perverse standard of excellence, exposing what’s rewarded. The phrase “refer only to one another” lands as the real accusation: jargon becomes a hall of mirrors, where meaning is produced by citation, not by contact with reality. You can be right because you’re fluent, not because you’re correct.
Context matters. Cooley wrote as a late-20th-century American aphorist, watching universities professionalize and specialize, as theory-heavy discourse (especially in the humanities) became a cultural punchline and an internal currency. His target isn’t knowledge so much as the career incentive structure that confuses complexity with rigor, and opacity with depth. The subtext: if your language can’t survive translation into ordinary speech, it may be serving your status more than your subject.
The line works because it’s structured like an indictment disguised as a technical definition. Cooley doesn’t argue that academic language sometimes gets insular; he offers a perverse standard of excellence, exposing what’s rewarded. The phrase “refer only to one another” lands as the real accusation: jargon becomes a hall of mirrors, where meaning is produced by citation, not by contact with reality. You can be right because you’re fluent, not because you’re correct.
Context matters. Cooley wrote as a late-20th-century American aphorist, watching universities professionalize and specialize, as theory-heavy discourse (especially in the humanities) became a cultural punchline and an internal currency. His target isn’t knowledge so much as the career incentive structure that confuses complexity with rigor, and opacity with depth. The subtext: if your language can’t survive translation into ordinary speech, it may be serving your status more than your subject.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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