Logorrhoea

Logorrhoea (US logorrhea) (Greek λογορροια, logorrhoia, "word-flux") is defined as an "excessive flow of words" and can occur in certain kinds of mental illness, such as mania. It is also highly prevalent in terms of the writing of members of the postmodern academic community. Symptoms of academic or quasi-academic logorrhoea include regular use of one or more of the following terms or phrases (the list is far from exhaustive):

• In terms of
• Impact on
• Indicate that
• Engage with
• Notions of
• Issues around
• Both... but also...
• Strategy
• Resonance
• Hegemony
• Dialogue
• Conversation (in the sense of dialogue)
• (Members of) the X community (logorrhoetes do not say "academics", "scientists", "soldiers", "punks" etc. Instead they say "(members of) the academic/scientific/military/punk etc community".)
• Optimal(ly)
• Maximal(ly)
• Proactive
• Impactive

In his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), the English writer George Orwell wrote about logorrhoea in politics. He took the following verse from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

He rewrote it like this:

--> Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Further examples are very easy to create:

Doctors say that the best way to lose weight is to eat less.

--> The medical community indicates that downsizing average nutritional intake over an extended time-period is optimally efficacious in terms of maximally impactive proactive weight-reduction strategies.

He is the sort of person who will call a spade a spade.

--> He is the sort of person who will call a spade a pedally operated humus-redistribution device.

Examples of logorrhoea can be found in the work of the following writers (the list is again far from exhaustive):

• Karl Marx
• Jacques Derrida
• Jean Baudrillard
• Hélène Cixous
• Michel Foucault
• Stephen Jay Gould

See also:

• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• Pleonasm
• Elegant variation
• Sokal Affair -- description of a hoax played on a prestigious postmodern journal

External Links

• "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee) (1)
• "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) (2)
• "Politics and the English Language" (http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language.txt) (3)
• The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) -- A computer program that writes meaningless but highly convincing postmodern essays
• This Day in Paradigms (http://www.geocities.com/aladgyma/articles/culture/pomo.htm) -- Another automated postmodern essay generator]
• The Sokal Affair (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) -- More on the Sokal affair