Occasionally someone asks me to translate the little sign on my Parrish Hall door that says, "Eschew otiose obfuscation sedulously." There are two ways to decode this $2-word aphorism: I can always redefine the words, as in "avoid functionless confusion diligently," but that's not much better. So let's forget the vocabulary lesson and focus on the meaning, which is "get to the point."
Most of the postings on my office door are about writing and language. There's a list called The Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay. (My favorite: "He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.") There's advice attributed to H.G. Wells: "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." (How true, says the editor.) And then there's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Hobbes is reading Calvin's research paper titled "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes." Calvin's comment: "Academia, here I come!"
Calvin raises a good question: Should educated writers use big or small words? To me what's important is to choose the right word. Sometimes that word will be common, sometimes more esoteric. Michael Berube of the University of Illinois recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that "it is perfectly all right for a researcher in an academic discipline to publish research that very few people outside the field ... can comprehend." Yet Berube; has also consistently urged scholars to communicate directly with people outside the academy-and to do so in a different mode, using clear, accessible language so that all may understand what higher education is about.
He's right. There shouldn't be any otiose obfuscation when making the case for the value of colleges and universities or when communicating about the importance of the teaching and research being done there. The liberal arts education we cherish at Swarthmore should be founded on a broad democratic understanding of the value of knowledge, and those who use words (even unintentionally) that create barriers to public understanding do so at their own peril.
I love good writing and good ideas, and we try to bring you lots of both in the Bulletin often written by alumni. This issue features Swarthmore's (and maybe America's) most famous writer, James Michener '29. It also contains the first appearance in these pages by a writer who graduated some 64 years after Michener, Susannah Hauze Hogendorn '93, plus articles by Ralph Lee Smith '51 and Suzanne Braman McClenahan '52. We are confident that in some measure Swarthmore has contributed to their facility with words, and we hope that you will read them-sedulously if possible.
-Jeffrey Lott
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Swarthmore College. All rights reserved. 1997