Wednesday, March 31, 2010

the democratization of democracy

Yesterday I discovered that work affords me access to JSTOR, and like the huge nerd I have never pretended not to be, I spent my lunch hour downloading and reading articles from The Law and History Review. It was good times generally, except that it reminded me of one of my big academic pet peeves: contemporary scholars who think that it's still okay to drop whole sentences of untranslated French or Latin into their writing. I know just enough French to find a public restroom in Paris, and after thirteen years of Catholic school, Latin is not wholly opaque. But c'mon, what are we, 12th Century Anglo-Norman aristocrats? Can we please just speak in the vernacular like honest and virtuous yeoman as opposed to, I dunno, elitist douchenozzles?