logorrhea

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It has been suggested that this article be split into articles entitled Logorrhea (linguistics) and Logorrhea (psychology), accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss)

Logorrhoea or logorrhea (Greek λογορροια, logorrhoia, “word-flux”) is defined as an “excessive flow of words” and, when used medically, refers to incoherent talkativeness occurring in certain kinds of mental illness, such as mania. Logomania is the medical condition of mania with the underlying symptom logorrhoea. The spoken form of logorrhoea (in the non-medical sense) is a kind of verbosity which uses superfluous (or fancy) words to disguise an otherwise useless message as useful or intellectual, and is commonly known as “verbal diarrhea” or “diarrhea of the mouth”.

Logorrhoea as a description of rhetoric

The word logorrhoea is often used pejoratively to describe prose which is highly abstract, and, consequently, contains little concrete language. Since abstract writing is hard to visualize, it often seems as though it makes no sense, and that all the words are excessive. Writers in academic fields which concern themselves mostly with the abstract, such as philosophy, especially postmodernism, often fail to include extensive concrete examples of their ideas; so an examination of their work might lead one to believe that it is all nonsense, hence the pejorative epithet “pomobabble” (a portmanteau of postmodern babble).

The widespread expectation that scholarly works in these fields will look at first glance like nonsense is the source of humor that pokes fun at these fields by comparing general nonsense with real academic writing. (Several computer programs have been made that can generate texts resembling the styles of these fields but which are actually nonsensical.) In an attempt to prove this lack of rigor, physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a nonsensical essay, and had it published in a respected journal (Social Text) as a practical joke. The journal kept defending it as a genuine article even after its author rebuked it publicly in a subsequent article in another academic journal. (See Sokal Affair).

Logorrhoea can also be used as a form of euphemism, to disguise unpleasant facts and ideas.

The term is also sometimes, less precisely, applied to unnecessarily (and often redundantly) wordy speech in general; this is more usually referred to as prolixity. Some people defend the use of additional words which sometimes look unnecessary as idiomatic, a matter of artistic preference or helpful in explaining complex ideas or messages, which might otherwise be unclear.

Examples of logorrhoea

In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), the English writer George Orwell wrote about logorrhoea in politics. He took the following verse (9:11) from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible:

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

He rewrote it like this:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Note Orwell’s deliberate usage of unnecessary words which only serve to further complicate the statement. For instance, the words “objective” and “invariably” could be cut, with virtually no loss of meaning. What both the Bible and Orwell were trying to say could be paraphrased (albeit obtusely) in three simple words: “Success is stochastic.”

In his anecdote collection Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the physicist and storyteller Richard Feynman describes a time when he participated in a multi-disciplinary conference discussing the nebulous topic “the ethics of equality.” Feynman was at first apprehensive, having read none of the books which the conference organizers had recommended. A sociologist brought a paper which he had written beforehand to the committee where Feynman served, asking everyone to read it. Feynman found it completely incomprehensible, and feared that he was out of his depth — until he decided to pick one sentence at random and parse it until he understood. The sentence he chose (to the best of his recollection) was:

The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.

Feynman “translated” the sentence and discovered it meant “People read”. The rest of the paper soon made sense in the same fashion.

Further examples are easy to create:

The medical community indicates that a program of downsizing average total daily caloric intake is maximally efficacious in the field of proactive weight-reduction methodologies.

(I.e., “Doctors say that the best way to lose weight is to eat less”.)

The benefits of being concise

While some authors may feel that using long and obscure words gives them the appearance of greater intelligence, a recent study from the Psychology department of Princeton University found that this was not the case. Dr. Daniel Oppenheimer conducted a series of five experiments which found that when shown samples of writing with varying word length, undergraduate students rated those with short, concise text, as being written by the most intelligent authors. By contrast, those who needlessly used excessively long words or complex font types were perceived to be less intelligent. For example, the author of “The principal educational aspiration I have established for myself is to utilize my capabilities to the fullest” was rated as less intelligent than the author of the slightly more concise: “The primary academic goal I have set for myself is to use my potential to the fullest”.^{[citation needed]}

In the United Kingdom, there is a pressure group called the Plain English Campaign who offer editing and training to authors in order to help achieve “Plain English”: “language that the intended audience can understand and act upon from a single reading”.

Logorrhoea as a form of mental illness

Logorrhoea is a language disorder present in a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders^[1] including aphasia[1], localised cortical lesions in the thalamus[2][3], or most typically in catatonic schizophrenia.

Examples of logorrhoea might include talking or mumbling monotonously, either to others, or, more likely, oneself. This may include the repetition of particular words or phrases, often incoherently. The causes for logorrhoea remain poorly understood, but appear to be localized to frontal lobe structures known to be associated with language. As is the case, for example, in emotional lability in a wide variety of neurological conditions, other symptoms take priority in clinical management and research efforts.

Logorrhoea should not be confused with pressure of speech, which is characterised by the “flighty” alternation from topic to topic by tenuous links such as rhyming or punning[4]. Logorrhoea is a symptom of an underlying illness, and should be treated by a medical professional. Several possible causes of logorrhoea respond well to medication.

See also

• Bloviate
• Cantinfleada
• Cluttering
• Demagoguery
• Dissociated press
• Elegant variation
• Gobbledygook
• Grandiloquence
• Markov chain
• Pleonasm
• “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell.
• Prolixity
• Schizophasia
• Readability
• Redundancy
• SCIgen, a program that randomly generates a fake research paper
• Word salad

References

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External links

• The Postmodernism Generator -- A computer program that writes meaningless but highly convincing postmodern essays
• The Sokal Affair -- More on the Sokal affair
• Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator
• A Markov text generator generates nonsense in the style of another work, because the probability of spitting out each word depends only on the n words before it
• Website of the Plain English Campaign
• Speech Disorders as Indicators of Potential for Lyrical Success A satirical look at how logorrhoea may contribute to a music career.