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Diana's avatar

Here’s the problem for those of middling to average intellect. I speak as a woman here of decent but by no means outstanding smarts.

First, we were promoted along the academic assembly line and lauded for the smallest hints of promise by well-meaning people who thought this would help us and, even more importantly, save the culture from the sins of its past.

At some point, we learned that we were incapable of understanding the vocabulary and concepts of science and mathematics. Maybe we should have been sitting in the “for dummies” version of the class but we weren’t and it was too late to ask for a refresher on elementary concepts. Or maybe we should have been pouring coffee or doing any of a number of other valuable and worthwhile things.

But we’ve been told from the beginning that what matters is sitting in that private club and talking about things in a language that people outside the club struggle to grasp. Forget that the language of science and math exist to be as precise as possible; what we noticed was that it was all Greek to us, so we’re going to work on our new Greek. We get to feel like brilliant academics, which is where we get our sense of worth, and you to feel good because now academia is filled with the descendants of those who were discriminated against (possibly— for my brother is as much a product of my great and great great grandmothers as I am).

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Mark Alexander's avatar

"[...] language was a fundamental component of the exercise of power; those who got to define the narrative, or define the norms and meanings, were those who had the power to do so."

I'm reminded of how words like "vaccine" and "case" and "misinformation" were redefined by Very Important Experts back in 2020 and 2021, so as to shame and ostracize dissenters.

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