Get Over Yourself

I was in class the other day (my LAST CLASS, incidentally) and my professor actually mentioned this, and I was overjoyed, because it's been one of my pet peeves for years now.

I understand that underdog academic disciplines seek validation. I do. I used to be an art student, and I know perfectly well everyone thinks artists are a bunch of navel-gazers who never say anything worth thinking about. Do you know why? Because we use absurdly inflated language to validate ourselves. Academic disciplines, especially the liberal arts ones, are under the impression that no one takes their ideas seriously, and so they use inflated language to encourage people to think of them as more important than they are.

Really, it does liberal arts disciplines a disservice. If you cannot make yourself understood, what is the point of any of your work? "Accessible" is an insult within the academic community, but if you aren't accessible to the general public, what good is your work? Certainly, you can respond to academic peers who use the same sort of inflated language, but who is going to read your paper, and what good is it to the population in general? And if you think your idea needs inflated language to justify its existence, maybe you should question whether you even need to say it in the first place.