Lately I have been pondering whether academia is innately philological. By philology I mean a love of and fascination with words and language. It seems to me that academia, regardless of subject, whether science or art, values language greatly. It places great stock in words and their use: everything must be clearly defined; any academic analysis uses complicated, specialist words. Language is how academia expresses and perpetuates itself – it is it’s very currency, underpinning the entire system. Any undergraduate essay or postgrad thesis is a written document; the better it is written, the more eloquently and precisely a candidate can use language, the higher his or her mark. As a discourse it relishes creating new words. To me this makes it a philological exercise. In Lacanian terms, academia is all about the Symbolic; individual success depends on how well one can access it. It all boils down to a deep love and valuing of language. This is a slightly random thing to note for a Sunday morning I know, but it’s interesting how one makes these strange connections when you’re lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep. One love – the love of language – seems to lie beneath the entire academic discourse, a common feature in any academic field.