One of the ways I prepared for graduate school is I made a little promise to myself. I told myself that if, in my studies, I encountered a word I didn’t know, I’d immediately stop and look it up.

Good thing. Dictonary.com and I have become good friends.

Higher education, like any sophisticated area, has its own jargon. Two doctors or two lawyers can talk to each other in way that, to an outsider, is virtually completely incomprehensible. Likewise with academics. In fact, it’s probably worse with academics.

And I speak as someone with a huge vocabulary. I’ve always had that; in first grade, I actually had a teacher who didn’t like me because, she told my mother, I spoke “too much like an adult.” When I was a kid, my schoolmates constantly asked me whether I read the dictionary for recreation (I didn’t). And since I’ve made my living as a writer, the problem (if it is one) has only gotten worse. I rarely encounter a word I don’t understand.

At least that was true before I started graduate school. Now, at least once a day, I run into a word I simply have never heard before, or at least never heard enough to care about. Higher learning has its own argot.

For example, a big grad school word is “normative,” not one you hear very often in casual conversation. When you say an idea is “normative,” you’re basically saying you’re talking about how something ought to be. One of my textbooks here had the riveting title, “Normative Theories of Journalism.” Something tells me it doesn’t sell a lot of copies to the general public, although the class briefly toyed with the idea of rewriting it as a children’s book. My suggestion for the title was “My Little Golden Book of Normative Theories of Journalism,” but the whole idea never went anywhere.

So yeah, I’ve had to speak a whole different language here.

That’s why it always amuses me when people who are basically anti-intellectual get all exercised over the public statements of some college professor. Generally, they misinterpret what professors say, because they don’t speak the lingo.

Then latest example, just this week, comes from attempts to tie President Obama to a now-dead college professor who created the concept of “critical race theory.” The folks at Breibart.com are flogging the hell out of the story; it’s an attempt to somehow smear Obama by association with a professor whose ideas they claim are radical. In the process, the people at Breitbart.com have pretty much totally misinterpreted the dead professor’s work, but accuracy has never been their long suit anyway; it’s a controversy that probably will be long forgotten by the time you read this.

Now, I haven’t studied “critical race theory,” but just by the name I can tell you it’s not something of any great importance outside the academic field. It might sound scary, but trust me, it’s probably relatively benign; all academic theories are, because the main function of an academic theory is to provide discussion fodder for academics.

Even though I don’t know a lot about it, I can tell you why it’s being misinterpreted. Two of the three words in the name don’t mean to academics what they mean to most people.

“Critical,” to academics, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re slamming something. Yeah, it involves criticism, but not in the way it’s normally understood. Criticism, in this usage, simply means examination; it means you hold up an idea and look at it from every angle you can think of, testing each angle to see if it says anything about the overall topic. Criticism, in an academic sense, can be as much positive as negative.

And “theory” simply means how ideas are connected. A theory attempts to draw a connection between two separate ideas. It doesn’t mean you think the connection is valid; it just means you see a connection, which you then test by various means. The germ “theory” of disease, for example, simply means a scientist thought diseases might have been caused by this critter called a “germ.” That was tested through experiments and eventually proved to be true. Other theories, like phrenology —the theory that bumps on your head could tell something about your personality – proved to not be supported by the results of experiments. Those become historical curiosities, but nobody bases serious science on things like phrenology any more.

So even if President Obama buys into “critical race theory,” all that proves is that he has a tendency toward a certain view of how things work in the world. Yeah, that will affect his politics, but believe me, it’s not a major influence. Politics is the art of the possible and academic theories, while they might have some value in the real world, are intended to work on a whole different plane.

That’s why the effort by Breitbart.com to make “critical race theory” some sort of issue aren’t just tiresome, they’re silly and waste everybody’s time. It’s a measure of how intellectually bankrupt conservatism has become that right-wingers try to take up the public’s time with word games even they don’t understand. Joblessness affects everybody. The lack of medical care affects everybody. This country’s tendency to invade Middle Eastern countries affects everybody. Academic theory affects almost nobody.

Of course, that could just be my opinion – or, to put it another way, my theory. You might want to test that out. If you want to find out how, let me know. I might have some normative ideas for you.