No, it’s not Bush. I mean, it’s not Dubya, or George W. Bush either. I doubt if he knows what that means. But I’m already wandering away from the point before I have even begun it. I promised myself that I wouldn’t take any digs at President George W. Bush, or even call him Dubya (there! I did it!), but I feel like Oscar Wilde when it comes to writing about the honorable and supreme commander of the United States (“I can resist everything except temptation.”)

Anyway, I wanted to talk about which profession can lay claim to practicing the maximum obfuscation when it comes to utilizing jargon indecipherable to the uninitiated layperson. I have myself juggled many educational pursuits over the duration of my still-continuing academic career. I began with differentiating the sui generis from the multivariate species whose study comprises the field of life science. In hindsight, a decade after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in that arena, I must confess that it is the least garrulous or grandiloquent among the ones I have experienced first-hand. With the exception of indubitably impeccable choices of Latin phrases for nomenclatural purposes, I believe complexification of language is neither a phylogenetic nor an ontogenetic characteristic of the biological sciences.

Insatiate in my exploration for prolix prose, I odyssed into the realm of the ubiquitously acknowledged practitioner of jargon-usage – management studies. In the course of my MBA, which was the immediately-succeeding stepping stone in my academic career to my life sciences degree, I gathered the skill (which I now exhibit here) of concatenating figures of speech inscrutable, sometimes, even to myself.

The noble art of obfuscation was not just a means in the profession of the MBA, but an end in itself.

Or, as advertising gurus would say, if you can’t communicate with your customer, confuse them. I discovered that the word “simple” simply does not exist in the lexicon of the management professional. Another way to put it is, “There is nothing so simple that we cannot complicate the hell out of it.”

Can you imagine the kind of havoc a writer with a management degree would wreak upon an unsuspecting public if he were to be loosed upon them to channelize messages exhorting the virtues of consumerism in sentences comprising no less than seventy words each? (Damn! That one only had forty-four.)

Well, before I could weigh anchor in my professional career as an advertising copywriter, and during the learning of the ropes in the advertising industry, I was advised by a seasoned veteran, a man who’d been there and done that, a man who minced no words (unlike me), that the general public generally does not possess (a) an advanced degree in English or (b) all the time in the world to read all the crap in those interminably long sentences that I thought were clever.

Unlearning and de-jargonizing my vocabulary was definitely an advantageous skill in my bag.

Or so I thought till I started preparing for my GRE to go back to school and pursue a master’s degree in the theoretical side of mass communications and journalism. If I was a cow grazing for the sweetest, juiciest leaves of pompous verbosity, the grass was not just greener on this side of the theoretical fence, it was an all-encompassing, expansive pasture of virtually limitless bombastic expressionism.

This, I thought, is the obfuscation capital of the world. When I move on to pursue a doctoral degree this autumn, the excitement of the soon-to-ensue opportunity to “push the envelope” (to use popular lingo once again) is immense. Indescribably inviting also is the auxiliary study of psychology and sociology, potential for which is presented through the choices strewn before me for the pursuit of pure research in the arenas wherein the lines between communication, marketing and management blur and an amalgamated area of study emerges.

I realize that obfuscation, as a topic of discussion, may not be as dear to many readers as I have pictured it to be here, but hey, if you want to discuss something (or do I mean somebody?), there’s always Dubya.

Narayan Devanathan is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Hyderabad, India.