Bonfire of the Humanities

Yes, I know, that title is already taken by a book critical of the Humanities departments of various and sundry universities, but it is too fitting for the hilarious comic from the website "xkcd: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."

The hobby of the blogger/comic is seeing how long it takes people of various professions to realize, in the course of "shop talk," that the person they are conversing with is NOT actually part of their profession. The Engineer takes 48 seconds to figure it out. The Literary Critic...

"You see, the deconstruction is inextricable from not only the text, but also from the self."

And how long does it take to note the deception?

"Eight papers and two books and they haven't caught on."

This reminds me of the book some years back by the NYU Physicist Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense. Sokal submitted politics-laden gibberish to a post-modern journal called Social Text, and they duly published it with great fanfare. The backlash shook much of academia, or so they say.

Personally, I like the comic better. It's shorter, funnier, and to the point.