ABSTRACT
A professor once wrote about Tonya Harding's attack on Nancy Kerrigan. The professor was writing in "pomobabble". This is the jargon of postmodernism, the intellectual movement that says truth does not exist and that all values and knowledge are "socially constructed"—made up to serve the interests of the powerful. Postmodernism has swept through the universities, doing great damage. But "pomobabble" has emerged as a source of constant mirth. As a hoax, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, wrote an article in dense pomobabble arguing that gravity and physical reality are social constructs. Pomobabblers now win most awards in the annual Bad Writing contest, says Denis Dutton, a professor in New Zealand and editor of Philosophy and Literature, the scholarly journal which sponsors the competition. Anyone can learn pomobabble. String together words like "hegemonic", "transgressive", "narrativity", and "valorization". Refer often to murky French philosophers.
