Matt, as usual, your analysis is far more subtle and generous than mine, from a while back: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/po/archive/000102.php

So it's old news. Well, the more of us keeping tabs on Sven the better. ;-)

Having spent 20 years in academia--all of it in English departments--it no longer surprises me when PhDs in English use words such as "empower" and phrases such as "make text." The word "empower" means nothing. Writers and speakers do not "make text," they write and speak. Or should we now call writers "texters"? But then people don't talk to each other, they have a dialogue or participate in discourse.

One writer suffering from Dorothy Parker syndrome, also known as Parkerson's Disease, once referred to an MLA conference as a Jargonaut. Jason would have trouble navigating, without a doubt, through the muck and quaqmire of modern English as spoken and written by those who teach the language and its literature. The very same crowd who will jump with both feet on the head of any freshman or woman who dares use abstract language--especially language meant to impress rather than to speak or write clearly.

Ah, ye olde jargon debate. What fun. Let me suggest that English departments, the humanities, and the university as an institution all have bigger things on their plates these days than the jargon debate. While we're at it though, are droll references to Greek mythology really any less obfuscating than a word like "empower"? Or is Jason and the Argonauts just part of cultural literacy?

In a 1979 article about the prevalence of the conduit metaphor (a closely-linked set of terms that describes an act of communiation as a coding, transference, and decoding), Michael Reddy poked fun at the alternative: “Instead of walking into a classroom and asking, ‘Did you get anything out of that article?’, I have to say, ‘Were you able to construct anything of interest…?’” (Reddy, Michael J. “The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language.” In Andrew Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 284-324). Of course, that is precisely the language that dominates contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Maybe poets are more elegant when they go about pushing the vanguards of language, but every so often a scholar/theorist/linguist gets it right.