"Laughoutloud funny!"

SDG here with an ego check for critics… like me.

Tom Payne, a literary critic, turns in a wickedly funny… er, make that a pointedly satiric exposé on the special jargon critics use, partly as a matter of trade necessity and precision, partly by carelessness and imitation, and partly to sound as if they know what they’re talking about and better than you.

The article is about literary critics, but I must confess that as a film critic I winced more than once at a well-skewered foible found in my own reviews. Not that all the listed clichés are necessarily bad. Phrases like “darkly comic” or “emotional rollercoaster” may be clichés, but they’re also useful — we know what they mean, and what would be the point of digging through the thesaurus for some less familiar way of describing a quality we already have a good term for?

That said, I hereby vow to be very careful in the future about phrases like “vast, sprawling epic,” and never, ever again to write “But these are minor quibbles.” (Aren’t quibbles minor by definition?) And I must confess that even before discovering this article I was already uncomfortably aware of my reliance on phrases like “at its core” and “at its center” (though not combined with Payne’s phrase about “a deeply moral work”).

Take that, fellow critics!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin