Edu-Speak: "Rubric"

   I really can't adequately express how much this word pisses me off now.

   You can't go two days at a university without hearing it. It's gone beyond buzzword status...now it's almost a mantra. (It hasn't hit mantra-hood as firmly as, say, "narrative"... So not even close to the shibboleth "diversity"...a word you'll hear ten times per day... (We're hiring a new provost for academic affiars...the first candidate mentioned "diversity" about 10,000 times in her address to the faculty; scholarship 0 times by my count.))

   It's also annoying because it's used instead of the more apt 'criteria.' But, of course, we have to linguisticize everything. Why talk about things or ideas or conditions if we can talk about words? It's all words, words, words. Things are retrograde constructs. ("Construct," as I almost forgot, is at least as pervasive as "narrative." It's a little bit of of thinly-veiled antirealism sneaked into every other conversation, half that time by people who aren't even fully aware of the implications of the term...)

   Ok, I'm just bitching.