Okay, okay.

Following recent Phi Beta Cons postings about the transgressive (or is it traversing?) field that is Medieval Gender Studies and about Nina Asher, gender studies & education prof and spinstress of unreadable prose, I received a number of e-mails from readers commending to my attention a site I had not seen previously.

It hosts the collected volumes of The Underground Grammarian (1977-1991), a defunct monthly newsletter that chronicles abuses of the English language at the hands of academics.

Addressed at first to the Glassboro State College community, it is an immensely entertaining read in spite of its seeming obscurity because of the late Richard Mitchell’s unique tone. And it’s a worthwhile read, too, if only because things haven’t changed much in academic writing over the years.

A small sample from its pages, still relevant today:

There is something here called Experiential Education. No one is sure what that means. Student-teaching, apparently, causes an experience; calculus does not. An arrangement which awards college credit to the student who licks paper tape in the shipping-room of the wind-up toy factory is called experiential; learning to speak a new language is not. This seems hard to understand, but it isn’t.When we say our thoughts clearly, we often see that they are stupid. Sometimes we see that they are also self-serving. The idea behind Experiential Education is both. Experiential as used here is worthless because it makes no useful distinctions. It is used by administrators to give presumed importance to the pedestrian labors which take them so long to accomplish and for which they take so much of the taxpayer’s money.Furthermore, people who can blithely tolerate experiential can’t have done much thinking about its meaning. That would indicate either dimness of mind or indifference. Thus we have to conclude that our Experiential Educationists [?] may be less interested in the meaning or doing of their jobs than in having them.