It is ironic to say that once in tenth grade we were given an assignment at the end of the year on arguing which book should be removed from the required reading list for future classes, and I chose Charles Dickens and his Great Expectations precisely for the fact that his sentences "twisted and turned more than the River Thames". Well, I suppose he's laughing it up deep within his grave as this is being written, smug with having convinced yet another to adopt his stylized technique. But to prevent loss of, as my senior year British Literature teacher put it, "ethos", I best not engage too long on personal anecdotes to preserve an aura of "authority". For now my perspective has changed, as I have joined the ranks of those who have come before and embraced the verbose, and I put it now to the reader to understand that the purpose of such lengthy prose is not, in any way, to annoy and internally bore the average student or academia, or to obfuscate the truth -- no, no, far from it. For in truth, there is much to laud about the invention of such complex literary devices, these literary behemoths that walk among the world of writing and scholarship.
First and foremost, I would declare, would be for the advantage of being able to cull from the miasma of low quality writing in favor of higher grade stock, an easy identification of the best of the best, the reliable from the sensational. As the inundation of yellow journalists, biased works, and fireworks of emotions continues to flood the internet and society, it is of utmost importance to combat such uninformed opinions and the uneducated masses with the sturdiest of words, rooted in Latin and Greek, built upon the widest of bases of centuries of academia.
And upon this foundation are established the jargon, the vocabulary, the language of our respective fields, the sub-fields that flank our ivory tower, from which rise the minarets of minutia, the wizened walls upon which we establish new interdisciplinary battlements. And deep within the heart of our keep are the debates between the most educated and wise of scholars on the location of the next tower, the future of the entire castle. Raise the drawbridge, close the gates, fill the moat! Lest we invite the barbarians in, for they lack the requisite knowledge and experience to adequately engage in any proper discussion of our field. We keep to ourselves, keep the language pure, maintain superiority of the shining ivory pinnacle that is our work for all the world to see.
But these words do not simply shine; they, too, have meaning. They give us ever greater precision into the finer, more complex details and iota of the depths of our field. For within these walls lay hallowed halls, as we worship truth and knowledge as the one and only within our chapels. Within the nave are held our greatest works, the fundamentals, Newton's Laws of Classical Mechanics, Darwin's Evolution, Kirchoff's Laws and Maxwell's Equations, the ostentatious eye-candy for the wandering observer.
But the true work lies beyond, to the left, right, up, and down, upon the base of the geniuses from an earlier time; hidden beneath the earth and dust the books and scribes scurry away to go ever deeper into the works of the masters, attempting to string from their clean, succinct, and fundamental laws ever deeper, elaborate, and complex theories. For the longer the sentence, the closer it comes to the truth, the more precise the answer. From constructs like General Relativity and the Standard Model are woven new ideas, gravitons, WIMPs, dark matter and energy, adding on to the endless row of books and scholarship in the crypts, all the while endlessly adorning and reinforcing, supporting the house of knowledge with ever more flying buttresses and pinnacles, words upon words upon words until the sentence becomes less a phrase than a list of concepts and the word itself a list of prefixes, roots, and suffixes all in an attempt to come closer to the truth as did those that came before.
An outsider claims the masters are wrong? That our foundation is unsound! Bah! How could one who has not studied the masters for years by candlelight nor under the scrutiny of the experienced few know anything? Challenges to authority are unacceptable and would waste years of work of the scholars deep within the veins of the crypt. The only way to make the truth effable, to make concepts tangible, is to go ever longer, ever farther, in order to be ever closer to the heart of the work of our forefathers.
All of which transitions into the final point: to limit the audience to only those who deserve to hear the words of the giants before them. Every word, every concept, a sharpened weapon against the ignorance of the dull, dull world. Against the masses turrets are loaded with ultra-fine alpha-wave resistant greco-eurasiatic reverse sliding cyclo-adamantium plated bullets and cannonballs loaded within p=np complete quark-powered cannons calibrated to the cosmological constant adjusted for time dilation as well as utilizing the infantry techniques displayed by Sun Zi's study of the proto-Mongols' excellent charge-and-flank technique in the 17th century. In other words, we know what we're doing. So much so that, as a matter of fact, the words are just words, the weapons just letters on paper, our true battle strength nil, and yet the barbarians run, out of fear of our knowledge, as well as our incomprehensibility to the simple-minded. For those who find our work dense, the academia irascible and arrogant, simply lack the necessary characteristics for true comprehension on a scale necessary for full discourse of the subject.
Now, at the end of a brief introduction on the true nature of such complex prose, or "longprose" as I coin it here, or "LP" for short, or "longp" in standard notation, or "lprose" in MLA, a reader must by now fully comprehend the versatility and usability of this complicated yet indispensable literary tool. Even taking the time to reduce such a concept to the standard, yet utterly trite "5-paragraph, 3-point" essay format was risking loss of completeness; however, it cannot be understated the utmost necessity in employing such techniques in future discussion to boost ethos and promote healthy and meaningful insight for all parties involved. Excluding those undeserving of such blessings, of course. For in this discourse the learned, the worthy, shall delve ever deeper into their work, and ever closer to the truth that lies high above in the shining ivory tower.