Look, I shouldn't even have any entries in this category, because I am fundamentally opposed to all of that academic jargon and any and all cute words that are supposed to sum up huge ideas. So I just don't consider myself a user of buzzwords. Nonetheless, here are some words I either use, love, hate, or throw around for effect. Here are a few of my "verbal grenades":

Apollonian/Dionysian

These are words I toss around a lot in Sexual Personae—in fact, they form the basic premise of the book. I riffed a little bit off of Nietzsche, but the idea is that these two notions are opposites. These terms come from both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian traditions.

The Apollonian represents light, maleness, masculinity, rational thinking, and progression toward an end-goal. And as I say, "Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated" (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson).

The Dionysian stands for all things opposite to the Apollonian. We're talking about all dark and Chthonic elements—and I admit from the outset that I prefer the word Chthonic over Dionysian because the latter now has too many associations with hedonism. The Dionysian is associated with mystery, otherness, paganism, destruction, ruin, and big messes—all that fun stuff. It's like a Fellini movie combined with Macbeth, or something like that.

Above all, the Dionysian is associated with women and wildness, orgies and mutilation, blood, pain, and excess—I think you get the point. Though I don't necessarily take sides, I do defend the importance of decadence, destruction, sadism, pornography, and other taboo indulgences that have been subdued by political correctness, feminist oppressions, and prudish liberalism.

The Chthonian is directly translated as "of the earth," and I prefer this term over Dionysian because—as you can see from my description—the term "Dionysian" has gotten a little out of hand. Unlike the Apollonian qualities I enumerate above, Chthonian ones are circular: they have no end, no final achievement, no progress.

And let's be frank: men like progress, achievement, goals, building toward something. Because the Chthonian is associated with women, you have to throw in all of that menstruation and childbirth stuff, which men find, well, not "attractive" and often downright terrifying. So in a lot of ways, the Apollonian is masculine, and the Chthonian is feminine.

Decadence

I mostly associate decadence with the 1890s—an era fancily referred to as the fin de siècle (translation: end of the century). Society has tried to repress and denigrate decadence, but I say bring it on! Decadence represents everything that is excessively modern, indulgent, and Apollonian. It's a rejection of nature for art, and it's a rejection of organic, messy, earthy things for Western artificiality.