The evil twin is the John Locke quote above. Anything that consists of spending more time on your internal jargon, codes and scaffolding than on the insights that they produce.
About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it, then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of import.
PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.
About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it, then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of import.
PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.