By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.
“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.” Continue reading “Politics and What Remains of the English Language”
