It's All About Knowing the Lingo

Success in life hinges on mastering the idiom of one’s environment. Here’s some of the CollegeSpeak I had to quickly pick up on/remember/reinstate in the vocab. Just throw some of these puppies out at your next party for an instant social boost:

pathetic fallacy: in literature, the notion that nature has human traits or responds to one’s emotions. In my life, the notion that I can sprint across the six lanes of traffic between my parking lot and the campus as quickly as the 20-year-olds. This has nearly led to my demise on numerous occasions. I learned to resist the impulse to take off with the herd if I hadn’t checked first to make sure both knees were working

unpacking the text: looking for meaning in the elements of a work of literature. With 21 novels to read and analyze in 16 weeks (in just half my courseload), I did more unpacking my first semester than a Victorian chambermaid at a country house during shooting season.

oeuvre (and God help you if you pronounce it “oov-ruh”; the other grad students and I were so afraid of doing so that we stuck our lips out practically into the next room to get it right): total body of work of an artist

quotidian: of the stuff of daily life; ordinary or commonplace. I think it would make a good insult in the right (wrong) hands: “You are so . . . quotidian.” Me, personally, I love being quotidian. Always have. Kids need lots of quotidian in their lives and I’m one of those people who naturally love providing it. I think quotidian is the basis of life, but I wouldn’t want to be without the non-quotidian stuff. Ouch. My brain hurts.

polemic: characterizes your opponent’s argument

reductive: you don’t want your term papers to be this

contextual: you do want your term papers to be this

dystopian: how life looks on Monday morning; holiday celebrations among some families

mimesis: Sunday brunch drink of champagne and orange juice, which you need a lot of when you ponder why some people just arbitrarily pick unusual words when perfectly good simpler ones like “imitation” or “mimicry” exist.

nugatory: At first I thought this might be a particularly bad section of purgatory, where demons give you noogies all the time, or you are stuck at an eternal traffic light with a really zealous picker in the next car, but no: it means “negligible”. And why wouldn’t you just use negligible? Because “nugatory” is a lot more impressive and keeps ‘em on edge, that’s why.

hoary Aristotelian nosology: ran across this phrase in a scholarly article and nearly flipped and died. It caused me to have a dream in which I was in purgatory at a traffic light and Aristotle was in the next car and he was . . . no, never mind.