Not who you’re responding to but I must vehemently disagree. In English, which doesn’t have a centralized governing body, the correct way of pronouncing/spelling something depends on your intention and expected audience. If your intended audience is English speakers then the correct spelling is probably octopi or octopuses, whichever you believe will cause the least confusion/distraction (surely it varies regionally).

However, usually my intention is to portray my unfathomably superior knowledge and intellect, so the correct spelling/pronunciation in this case is: octopodes (which I think he had listed but ironically got ‘corrected’ to ‘octopuses’).

I agree that that’s probably what it’s trying to say, but I don’t think it actually says that.

I don’t think that there’s a higher concentration of morons in academia than in larger society. However, their professional experience is pretty different from the so called ‘real world’ so they definitely can have some unfathomable blind spots.

Meta has accused the company of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit.

What?

I don’t read much (/any) academic writing, but does it really misuse words the way the link portrays?

Eg

• academic writing isn’t prose, like that’s almost the definition of prose.
• intra-specialized doesn’t mean anything (the intra prefix didn’t work on adjectives)
• “obfuscating … accessibility” means making it difficult to see that it is accessible, where the author probably actually wants to say “reducing the ability of outsiders to access the meaning”

I get that it is satire, but imo it would be better satire if he put in the work to actually make it mean something. Unless the point is that academic writers misuse thesauruses this badly.

I’ve never heard anyone with first hand experience complain about living in North Korea. They literally can’t complain.