I've run across this (and similar) phrases a few times in the past few minutes. This particular turn of phrase comes from Alemseged, et. al. "A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethipa." Nature 443:296-301. It peppers the paper, but here's the abstract:
One has to wonder if Alemseged, et. al. think that they somehow count as doing better science if they can use more words to say something that can be said quite simply in ordinary English. I suspect that too many evolutionary anthropologists write like this all the time. Why? Because they want to make it impossible for the average layman to read anything they have to say? Because they think redundant bombastic, declamatory, fustian sesquepedelian grandiloquence is a virtue? Stop it. Please! And this is actually one of the more comprehensible passages. Here's what that linguistic abomination means in plain English:
This is what they should have said. Not that "evidence provides evidence". Not that that there is "a tree-climbing locomotive component in the hominid's locomotive repertoire". Where else would that locomotive component be? In the masticative repertoire? Is it possible that the literature over in paleoanthropology is so perverse that they do have to distinguish arboreal components of masticative repertoires from the same components of locomotive repertories because they wouldn't be writing a publishable scientific paper if they said that the damned monkey ate tree leaves?




A philosopher complaining about obscurantist jargon?
Posted by: Noumena | Monday, 09 February 2009 at 07:38 PM