Speaking Academese

“I think you are probably confused about a lot of stuff. This is my second year of teaching.” He paused. “Are you thinking of graduate school?”

“Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.”

Read more in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah