The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People [Hardcover]

 

 

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Anyone who has been embarrassed to be caught saying "book" when the cool word to use is "text" will appreciate this witty take on the terms used by those pleased to think of themself as on the cutting edge of human thought. As someone who has plowed through Foucault for a graduate course, I laughed out loud at the definition of "Foo Co" as a Chinese company that repairs clocks.

These emperors are shown to be clothed in nothing but their own hot air. Of course a lot of these thinkers have something real to say (though they often can't write it in plain English, or even plain French), but it is an overwhelming relief to read a work clearly written be people in the know, but who don't take it all so SERIOUSLY.

Get this book, lighten up, shift your paradigm, and enjoy Benson and Stangroom, who remind us that Lyotard really didn't have anything to do with aerobics. Presumably it was Mr Stangroom, not Ms Benson, who defined "Penis Envy" as "Not mine, you wouldn't." (Or maybe not...)

If the name Sokal doesn't thrill your rebel soul more than Che, or if the entry for science fiction - "Well of course it is" - doesn't make you laugh out loud, this may not be the book for you - although you may well benefit most from the enlightenment it brings. If, however, when I ask you to respect my opinion that homeopathy works for me, not because I have offered sound reasons and good evidence or because I have made some minimal effort to acknowledge and respond to the mass of countervailing evidence, and if, when I suggest that your mind has been closed to such therapies as a result of the "hegemonic encroachment of Western medical techniques", and if, when I assert that "absolutely negativizing disease" clearly goes hand in hand with "repressive political possibilities", if after all these representations you want to punch my lights out, then buy this book and batter me with sense instead.

The sentence you've just read is as clear as "Jack and Jill went up the hill" compared with the "clotted jargon and tortured syntax" and the "pompous and unreadable style" of much academic writing on, say, "Theory". Such writers blame the "unreliability of language", which "means that nobody can say quite what they mean to say." Since they haven't got anything worth saying anyway, "this is probably very convenient". If they weren't so down on epistemology (a useful "philosophical word to indicate that it isn't possible to know anything"), you could engage them in a discussion on how meaning does arise, on how individual words are indeed meaningless, on how context is all important ("I beat my wife" if not followed by something like "at cards" might have you reaching for the phone). Since by now you will have been withered by the look of contempt when you wondered "how it is possible to know that it isn't possible to know anything", you're unlikely to ever reach this stage of the conversation.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom have little patience with those "Leftist academics" who pride themselves on their anti-Darwinism and anti-science posturing, and who at the same time pinch and misuse scientific words like "quantum", "chaos" and "relativity" for their own "quasi-scientific ruminations". "Fashionable Nonsense" satirizes these attitudes and practices, and in so doing defends science against "reality bending and wishful thinking". The entries on accuracy (the foolish idea that "we can get our facts straight"), holistic ("Whole, pure, sincere, whole, integrated, spiritual, whole, centred"), mathematics ("Who cares"), the MMR jab ("if you want to be really good at mathematics"), physics ("A very male kind of science, all mathematics-driven and cold"), popular science ("Yeah, right"), and science itself ("A tiny cabal of powerful people who ignore what the majority of humanity believe") leave you in no doubt of Benson and Stangroom's own stance. And truth? "A quaint, old-fashioned word... No longer needed."

Why does any of this matter? "It matters because truth matters", because "clear thinking and reason and open eyes are good things", because fashionable nonsense is "worth resisting". Some chap called Diderot had a go at laying down a dictionary a while back, with the aim of escaping past pieties and present tyrannies and of promoting a secular and rationalist view of the world. "Fashionable Nonsense" is in the spirit of that encyclopaedia but it enjoys two considerable advantages: it's not in French and it doesn't run to seventeen volumes. Put this in your pocket and you will never again fear being mugged by a postmodernist. (And if this whets your appetite, go and read Norman Levitt's masterpiece, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture.)

Brilliant. Very funny, and gets funnier as it goes along. Also nails targets that need nailing.

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