Twaddle Tendency

We fill silence with words, even when we have nothing meaningful to add. Confident, fluent nonsense is often mistaken for insight.

• Management consultants use dense jargon and lengthy reports to communicate what could be said in a single sentence — obscuring the absence of real insight.
• Academic papers in the humanities are sometimes deliberately impenetrable — the obscurity masks the thinness of the underlying idea.
• Politicians answer questions at length without ever addressing what was asked — the flood of words substitutes for actual content.