Mason Cooley Quotes

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

Crabbed and obscure definitions are of no use beyond a narrow circle of students, of whom probably every one has a pet one of his own.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

Hermione uses all these big long tongue twister words. I don't know what she's going on about half the time!

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.

There is no such way to gain admittance, or give defence to strange and absurd Doctrines, as to guard them round about with Legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefin'd Words.

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.

The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."

Avoid an unusual and unfamiliar word just as you would a reef.

The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.