Methodius Hayes (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} methodius) wrote,@ 2007-10-10 10:32:00 |
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| Current location: | Tshwane, Gauteng |
| Entry tags: | english usage, jargon, obfuscation, sociologists, sociology, stanislav andreski, verbiage |
Stanislav Andreski dies
I was sorry to read of the death of Professor Stanislav Andreski, the Polish-British sociologist. As the obituary in The Independent reports:
Andreski always wrote a clear, impeccable and attractive English that was a pleasure to read. He held in contempt those social scientists who were obscurantists and jargon-mongers, and in 1974 published an attack on them in his best-selling Social Sciences as Sorcery. It was very popular with the public but infuriated those of his colleagues whose careers were based on concealing behind verbiage the fact that they had nothing to say. Andreski was equally contemptuous of bureaucracy and when he received an absurd questionnaire from the Social Science Research Council asking him what method he used, he replied "thinking".
In my later career as an editor of academic texts, I had reason to be grateful to Andreski for honing my bullshit detectors, as I was often (too often) called upon to edit texts by academics "whose careers were based on concealing behind verbiage the fact that they had nothing to say". There was even an entire discipline, Fundamental pedagogics, based on that principle.
There's more on my other blog: Notes from underground: Stanislav Andreski dies
