pseudointellectual

A pseudointellectual is someone who spews great amounts of garbage, interlaces it with huge words, and then expects to be accepted by the generally weak-minded sheep as a true intellectual. they are to be pitied and shown no leniency whenever you tromp on them with an actual argument.
script kiddies are often pseudointellectuals.

This is what graduate school will turn you into if you aren't very, very careful. It can be an amazing process, as genuinely smart, interesting people are reduced to spewing out ten times as many words with one-tenth the actual content within a year or two at most.

The reason this happens, particularly in liberal arts fields, is one of the dirty secrets of academia: deep in our soul of souls, we know that most of what we study could be just as easily understood by someone with a decent high school education and a willingness to think about things other than sex, sports, and reality television. In order to justify our well paid, secure, cushy academic jobs, an elaborate jargon has been built up over the years for each field and subfield to intimidate the plebes. This is a vitally important point for any incoming graduate student to realize, because your years before your dissertation are not spent learning about your subject (you did that in undergrad), but learning the advanced jargon of the subject and the history behind said jargon.

The worst part about it is, a lot of academics realize this and want to change it, but in order to gain enough respect from your colleagues for them to actually listen to you say, "Hey, we should change this," you still need to learn the jargon and say it in the jargon.

Case in point: during my first year of my religious studies MA, I was having an impossible time parsing what the hell my Intro to Modern Theology professor was saying about, well, anything for most of the semester. Finally, in the last month of class, it finally dawned on me what he and the older grad students were saying, and I made the mistake of blurting it out in plain English:

Me: Wait, so what we're saying is that theology is a dying field because nobody thinks it's relevant, and nobody thinks it's relevant because nobody can understand what we're talking about.

(long pause)

Professor: Well, yes, basically....

Me: Then why don't we try saying it that way for starters?

He was not amused. And unfortunately, he was also the head of the department, which is one of the many reasons why I'm now in communication studies instead of religion.

He’s the one who has half-hour-long conversations
About books he’s never read and likely never will
Because he’s so damn busy all the time.
He’s the one who uses “intrinsic” in a sentence
Even though he’s not quite sure what it means
And the subject is quite far removed from philosophy.
He’s the one who has a solution to all the problems in the world
Except his own.

And yes, he does have them
A lot of them
And he knows it, too.
He reminds himself daily
Of his failures and follies
Of his post-modern panic attacks and debilitating doubt
The more cynical, the better.
Not pessimistic, but realistic, he says.

Sometimes he blames it all on society
Which he knows is wrong
But he does it anyway.
Sometimes he blames it all on God
Which he knows is wrong
But he does it anyway.
Sometimes he says it’s because he’s human
And that much is true…

But where does it get him?
Where do his notions and questions and dead white man quotations lead him?
His big ideas are big only inside his mind
So what value do they have if he keeps them there?
At what point do his ideas turn to actions
And his actions to consequences
And those consequences to new situations, so new ideas
New intellectual frontiers
A cycle of inspiration
A necessary cycle…

But for him, the cycle is stuck.
The wheels stopped turning years ago
The gears have rusted
And all he can do is crank out the same old existentialism, over and over.
And guess what, he knows it
But he’s never bothered to fix it.
Because he likes the way this chaos feels
The way his infant thoughts feel
As they're forming in his brain, squirming and jostling
The way his thesaurus words feel
As they roll off his tongue and drip onto the empty page
A kind of intellectual masturbation.

And he really likes that term–
“Intellectual masturbation”
He has to repeat it to himself because of how brilliant it is.
So he’ll go and write a poem about it
(Free verse, of course)
A poem about people who think they can think their problems away
A poem about people who do too much thinking, and not enough learning
Because they think they already know
A poem about pseudo-intellectuals.
He likes using that word, too
Because it suggests that he isn’t one.