Question

[Olga Meerson]

I think the problem is that Russians thing in abstract nouns--
sometimes losing their referents and thus being too smart for 
their own good, while the English language requires that the 
burden of the meaning be in actual predication, i.e., that the 
verb would MEAN something.  This saves the English language 
Academia from a rapid deterioration into meanigless theorizing 
idolatry. The deterioration, of course, occurs here as well, 
but not as rapidly: structurally, the unit of meaning is the 
sentence, with overt predication, not some kind of a smart-
sounding term, which, can be described in Gogol's words about 
Petrushka and his reading habits: "что вот-де из букв вечно 
выходит какое-нибудь слово, которое иной раз черт знает, что и 
значит". Such an apt description of "learned" writing and love 
for technical terms in the Humanities!
Avoiding terms won't do either. The only way out, apparently, 
is to start writing while investing the actual thesis in the 
actual predicates of actual sentences.  English is a tough but 
useful trainer for this mentality. I know this first hand, as 
I learned the hard way, being a native speaker (and writer!) 
of Russian.

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