Using concepts properly is pretentious? Concepts are around for a reason. Even hard-nosed positivist agree that abstraction is necessary. Again, just because you don’t know what a word means doesn’t make it a silly word.
Insufferable Words Commonly Used
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I hate when the internet makes me mad, but somehow this well-meaning thread upsets me. I know, I need to get outside.
But...
Crisis? Explicate? Institution? Milieu? Systemic?
These all have decades and sometimes over a century of conceptual meaning that predates reg monkeying.
Do people really use an internet thesaurus, for example, to figure out the methodological meaning of “explicate” and frown on people who use complex concepts properly?
Think on this: people that think “systemic” is an annoying word are reviewing papers by sociologists, who study social systems.
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People fall back on cliche sociology words because writing is hard.
They also do so because they’re young and by definition haven’t been around long enough to parse out informal writing norms about what is or is not currently cliche terminology.
We don’t like these words because at some point in the past they became overused. Yet grads are contemporarily getting assigned to read texts that might use these words because they are from a time when they were not yet overused. How are they supposed to know the difference? That comes with time, and mostly happens informally.
TL;DR stop acting like assholes.
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Emergent or emerging
Assemblage(s)
"the queering of X"
"queer ontologies of X"
Latinx or Filipinx
Rhizomatic
Articulation(s), rearticulation(s), disarticulation(s)
Entanglement
"everyday resistance"
Black bodies, brown bodies, etc
"the visualities of X"
"imaginaries of X"
post-XYZ
biopolitical
necropolitics
"decolonizing X"god help me
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people that think “systemic” is an annoying word
I would suspect some of the annoyance with this word stems from whether it's correctly used. A lot of times when I see it in a paper, systematic would probably be a better word (i.e. in many instances "systemic racism" would be more accurately described as systematic racism as that implies an organized system of racism).
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Emergent or emerging
Assemblage(s)
"the queering of X"
"queer ontologies of X"
Latinx or Filipinx
Rhizomatic
Articulation(s), rearticulation(s), disarticulation(s)
Entanglement
"everyday resistance"
Black bodies, brown bodies, etc
"the visualities of X"
"imaginaries of X"
post-XYZ
biopolitical
necropolitics
"decolonizing X"god help me
Agree with all of these except "emergent" used correctly.