Eschew Obfuscation

MANIFESTO

Dick Cavett wrote a great piece in Friday's New York Times regarding the recent Petraeus/Crocker burlesque wherein he opined,

Never in this breathing world have I seen a person clog up and erode his speaking — as distinct from his reading — with more "uhs," "ers" and "ums" than poor Crocker. Surely he has never seen himself talking: "Uh, that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering." (Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)

... Petraeus commits a different assault on the listener. And on the language. In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to "Eyewitness News." Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and "scholasticism" — possibly even that dread thing, "intellectualism" — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their "articulation."

As one who tries to sound as if he has a brain in his head, I enjoyed the column, if not the testimonies, immensely. To be sure, this might well qualify me as an elitist, but I'm willing to take the chance.

Speaking of elitism, it's long been a practice of demagogues to attack intellectuals lest they upset the apple cart of authoritarian rule. From Stalin to Hitler to Huey Long to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon (and his felonious henchman, Spiro T. Agnew) to the current executive branch: All have complained about (or imprisoned, or had executed) the rational and objective voices in their societies. To see the Wellesley Phi Beta Kappa and former editor of The Yale Law Review, Hillary Clinton, stoop to such demagoguery is at best disappointing.