Maybe narcissism. Or maybe it’s just a mechanism of coping with impostor syndrome.

The reason it came to mind was a women’s month symposium at my school, where a speaker half-jokingly suggested there might be a correlation between the amount of needless jargon an academic writer uses and the level of their impostor syndrome. But jargon is also used as a kind of code to see who belongs.

I don’t imagine this interests anyone else, so I’ll shut up now.