New words

I've had a term of coping with new terminology, and words that I think I know then find that they mean something else in this academic context, or something more than I had understood. This week's words were intersubjectivity, locutionary and illocutionary and perlocutionary, which have to do with Searle's speech act theory and I read them in Ethnographic Research: A Reader, in a chapter on 'Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit' by Hutchins and Klausen. By the time I got to asking husband about a synedoche, which wasn't in his dictionary either, both of us were all jargonised out. I mean, that we'd had too much jargon. So when a couple of days later I found this poem in the introduction to 'Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography' editors Clifford & Marcus, it really spoke to me. The editors prefix it with

"Finally, as an Invocation, we offer the following verses composed in mock despair by our first editorial reader, Jane Kepp, dictionary in hand."

The Hermeneut's Dilemma, or, A Jargon Poem

Twas prelapsarian, and the hermeneut
Sat huddled with his faithful trope,
Sunk in thaumasmus, idly strumming his lute,
Lost in subversion with nary a hope.

Then with heartfelt apoplanesis he cried,
O come, interlocutor, give me your ear!
In my pathopoeia, I've slandered and lied;
Now of my grim project this discourse you'll hear.

I've dappled in vile phenomenological rites,
And joined in a secret synecdoche,
Squandered my received knowledge in bibulous nights,
And embraced epistemological heresy.

O, but now my metonymy is too great to bear!
This ecphonesis has become too deictic to hide!
I've lost all the poesis I once held so dear . . .
And, with typical hypotyposia, he died.