LANGUAGE:

MOLLY LAMENTS AND MOURNS FOR A WORD:

While writing the previous post Molly caught herself before she used the word "analysis" when referring to some of the posts. Now Molly has spent decades being disgusted by and trying to avoid "leftoid language", and the use of "analysis" in leftist writings is one of the things that irks her. "Analysis" may not be the worst of the linguistic baubles that leftists use to make their opinions seem more erudite than they actually are, but it definitely belongs in the same linguistic toy box. 999,999 times out of a million the use of this term could be replaced with words or phrases such as "description", "criticism of" or even "repeating", and the meaning would be much more accurate if considerably less pretentious. While being several orders of magnitude less pseudo-intellectual than that grand classic "dialectic" the term "analysis" still obscures meaning and sense rather than illuminating them.

"Analysis" actually has meaning in some fields of human endeavor where it illuminates rather than disguises. Molly became familiar with one when she was young- "chemical analysis"-, and there are surely others in the descriptive sciences where it is useful to break down an undifferentiated mess into its constituents. Molly has to take it on faith that the use of this terms in semantics is also useful. There are, however, words in the private language that I will describe as "left-speak" that are not at all useful, and "analysis" is definitely one of these. At its worst in the curriculum-vitaes of post modernists it is even more mendacious that its use in left speak. There it means basically taking any part of a piece of writing at random and constructing whatever fantasies you want from this starting point. In such cases "stream of consciousness bullshit" would be a better term to describe what is happening.

If you deliberately try and eliminate jargon that is not useful from what you say and write your thought will be a lot clearer for the effort. There are times when jargon is indeed useful as a shorthand for things that would take a lot longer to spell out. I will, however, venture the following opinion. There is NO- exactly none-private leftist word that is useful, and the vast majority of them are harmful to rational thought. I challenge anyone to give me a counter-example. Also please rap me over the knuckles if I ever use "analysis" in this blog.