Monday, June 09, 2008

Brief glory ...

... Spartans of the Plains.

The modern academic is compelled by peer pressure to write prose spangled with jargon, academy-speak and gobbledygook. I suppose Hämäläinen is not to blame, because if he wrote in plain English, instead of larding his text with the rebarbative language used by his colleagues, they would doubtless accuse him of being a mere journalist. And so we get totally unnecessary discussion of various academic models - differential spaces, cultural hegemons. At one point Hämäläinen defines a horse as 'a transportation device that compressed spacial units into conquerable size'.

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