May 25 1996 Peter Jones aims a custard pie at practitioners of cultural studies and their pretentious gibberish 

An American academic, the physicist Alan Sokal of New York University, has finally called the bluff of the jargon-ridden world of "cultural studies". Tiring of their nonsense, he stitched together an article from the silliest quotations he could find, entitled it "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and submitted it for publication. The editors of the academic journal Social Text duly obliged. 

Before we mock, however, let us be clear what we are talking about. Every discipline has its specialist vocabulary. We need terms such as "chromosome" and "dactylo-epitrite". They are shorthand for complex phenomena. Jargon, however, is longhand for simple phenomena. Its purpose is to obscure ­ and obscurity seems to be the particular vice of the humanities and social sciences. 

Those mainly responsible are 20th-century French linguistic philosophers. They argued that language could never reflect or describe external reality, only create it. Reality was therefore personal to the creator, ie, the speaker (and especially, for some reason, the writer). It could not be shared by anyone else. 

Academics who swallowed this obvious nonsense were therefore obliged to jettison the idea that they were looking for truth. Their job now was to reveal that there was no such thing as truth. But a new approach required a new vocabulary. Since language was regarded as slippery and indeterminate, that vocabulary had to be slippery and indeterminate too. It had to reject the very idea of clarity, let alone reason, logic or evidence. These, after all, demonstrated that things were or were not the case ­ anathema to the new way of thinking. 

This explains how Sokal's article was accepted. It spoke the lingo. That was all that counted. Evaluating the argument was of no interest. 

Once you know the jargon, however, it is easy to compose in it ­ and the joy of it is, what you are trying to say does not matter. Indeed, quite the reverse. It helps if you have nothing to say. Then you can expend all your effort on saying it. 

Here, then, is the Times instant, self-adjusting guide to Getting Academic Articles Guaranteed Automatic Acceptance (GAA-GAA for short). These are the key words: 

Nouns: discourse, negotiation, engagement, contestation, reading, positioning, appropriation, process, indeterminacy, dialogue, closure, boundaries, terrain, parameters, complexity, disjunction, articulation, negotiation, voice, space, ambiguity, paradox, mode, interrogation, utterance, sign, symbol, signifier. 

Verbs: confront, encode, contest, challenge, essentialise, transgress, articulate, function, instantiate, locate, enact, occlude, constitute, inscribe. 

Adjectives (and their associated adverbs): allusive, antagonistic, dialectic, enigmatic, ironic, reflexive, hermeneutic, shifting, complex, discursive, ambiguous, elusive, problematic. 

Note: for added scholarly piquancy, add "self-", "multi-", "trans-" or "re-" to any of these at random. "Self-reflexive", however that differs from "reflexive", is especially popular. 

Now: pick any of the above words in an order which will ensure a grammatical utterance. and add prepositions and conjunctions to taste. 

Then select a subject (Shakespeare, let us say, or Sophocles, or Kevin Keegan or ­ well, anyone or anything, really). Insert subject in appropriate spot. Bingo. 

"The elusive indeterminacy of Shakespeare's ambiguous and problematic self-positioning instantiates while it occludes the enigmatic renegotiation of multi-hegemonic self-interrogation within the shifting parameters of its own trans-discursive space." Terrific stuff! You think I made it up? Then try this, on post-colonial literature: 

"The disjunctive present of utterance allows the articulation of subaltern agency to emerge as relocation and reinscription. In the seizure of the sign, there is neither dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of given symbols of authority that shifts the terrain of antagonism. This is hybridity as a contesting, antagonistic agency functioning in the time lag of sign/symbol." 

What can one do about all this? The Frenchman Noel Godin (alias Georges le Gloupier) has one useful approach. Entarteur extraordinaire, he throws custard pies at practitioners. He has hit the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy five times. 

My colleague David West makes a more modest proposal ­ the formation of a Whistle Club. Members carry an Acme "Thunderer" and let it rip on hearing more than three of the forbidden words in any sentence. 

It is academics who have fallen for this drivel. It is academics who must root it out. 

The author helps to run Friends of Classics and lectures in Classics at Newcastle University.