Language

I used to know a man (in his early eightees then) who set out to obtain an Open University degree (he did get it). One day he showed me some of a lecturer's notes in History, commenting that that lecturer was immensely knowledgeable and a brilliant explicator of his subject. I read a page but could not understand any of it. To my mind it was nonsensical. I could, of course, read the words - they were quite familiar to me - and I could even read some of the sentences; but they meant nothing to me. I had the feeling that I was reading, or trying to read, something that was showing how deep the man was intellectually without his actually presenting any understandable arguments.
It took me back to a physics book that was reccommended to students starting the degree course in physics: the book was unreadable. It is almost as if the authorities wanted to appear wiser than they were and therefore had given the students stuff that they knew would be unfathomable, pretending they themselves were able to fathom it.
In last week's Spectator an art critic (usually a very good one) wrote this about the artist Alan Reynolds: "The new work consists of white reliefs and pencil drawings, which contine Reynolds's exploration of the dynamic relationships between the horizontal and the vertical." I'm pretty sure that Andrew Lambirth undrestands what this means but I certainly don't. However, I'll not go further into this and give him the benefit of the doubt since he knows a lot more about art than I do. But what does it mean?
In The Times today Daniel Finkelstein quotes a professor at the London School of Economics thus: "A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the 'governors' and the 'governed and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project." Finkelstein says "I haven't got the first clue what the professor is going on about."
Neither have I.