At some point in the mid-1990s, academic authors in the
humanities began to use the verb "complicate" when they didn't
have anything useful to say. They were always talking about how
some new consideration or alleged insight "complicates" our
understanding of this or that. "Such a view of early Victorian
culture," they'd say, "complicates our understanding of
Tennyson's metrical romances." Well all right, one thought, but
could we get to the part where you uncomplicate it? But they
never did. They felt that it was sufficient to point out that
something was more "complicated" than was hitherto thought.
Alan Ackerman's "Just Words" falls firmly into that tradition.
Mr. Ackerman, a professor of English at the University of
Toronto, is typical of academics in the humanities in this
regard: He feels that he has done his job by making his topic
more confusing than it was—no need to clean up the mess. The
book "challenges assumptions" and "raises questions" on page
after page, but nowhere amid all the assumption-ch