Flowery Language

From my own experience, mostly in college, when I didn't know what I was talking about I bs-ed. I think it's a human defense mechanism: when we don't want to be embarrassed by our lack of knowledge or understanding, we tend to puff ourselves up and try to convince ourselves and others around us that we know what we're doing [see current White House administration for demonstration of this theory]. In college, I tried to use big words and important sounding sentences. I fiddled with the margins, font size, and font type to make a 3-page paper reach the minimum 5-page length. Some of the papers I wrote were good, but some were garbage (and unfortunately for me, some of my professors knew this, too).

Fast forward six years, to my recent attempt to help a friend translate a document from Russian to English. The specifics are not important; suffice to say it was a description of an organization. I felt like I was reading one of my old, bad papers. There were grandiose and complex sentences that might initially impress, but actually said nothing. There were no concrete, measurable goals – only vague ideals of a pseudo-utopian society.

Of course, I'm not completely without responsibility for this literary "un-masterpiece." I did the translation and type it up. Though I tried to inject my translation with planer language, in the absence of the original author I couldn't do much toward creating anything with a clear strategy for how to bring about social change. As an excuse, I can only say the deadline was nigh and time was short. Sounds just like the excuse I used in college.