Conference thebay::joyoflex

82.0. "Overdoing it" by MILOS::CALLAS () Wed Jun 26 1985 20:25

Historians can -- though not all do -- make themselves understood in everyday
English, the language in use from Chaucer to Churchill. Let us beware of the
plight of our colleagues, the behavioral scientists, who by use of a
proliferating jargon have painted themselves into a corner -- or an isolation
ward -- of unintelligibility. *They* know what they mean, but no one else does.
Psychologists and sociologists are the are the farthest gone in the disease and
probably incurable. Their condition might be pitied if one did not suspect it
was deliberate. Their retreat into the arcane is meant to set them apart from
the great unwashed, to note their possession of some unshared, unshareable
expertise. No matter how illuminating their discourses, if the behavioral
scientists write only to be understood by one another, they must come to the end
of the Mandarins. 

		-- Barbara W. Tuchman
		   The Historian's Opportunity