In my Ancient Art History class (mostly worthless), the categorizing words are Latin (?) based made to sound scientific and smart only because the scholars have no idea what they are looking at, and there is no good way to talk about any of it. In Linguistics 300 I learned out to make up scientific sounding words. It's easy.
In Iran Through Film (fabulously adorable prof), we are reading a book titled "Strange Times, My Dear" (which I highly recommend), an anthology of contemporary Iranian literature full of translated stories and poetry with most incredible uses and manipulations of language.
My class with the hilariously ambiguous title "The English Novel" (it makes my Scottish prof laugh) is taught with a strong accent and an attitude of awareness about the differences of dialects.
One of the most entertaining professors I have is a poet. He teaches Modern British Literature. If he, by chance, says a word combination that sounds nice, or is complex in irony or existentialism he repeats it, lovingly. He loves words.
In the Modern Middle East 2, we constantly face loaded words with meanings that must be chased after and pinned down, and words from other languages or eras or empires that will never translate all the way (and somehow, a lot of words that sort of rhyme). Yesterday, the weirdest thing happened. We were discussing the "Seventeenth century crisis and its effect on the Middle East" in small groups and I feel weird discussing things with nameless people, so I asked my seatmates their names. I was sitting with a Don, Allison and Doug. I started and said "Ha! Wow, random!" and forgot to explain why.
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