People who complain about this sort of detailed terminology, and people who call things “wank” are generally, with an almost 100% rate of accuracy, people who are unfamiliar with any sort of detailed work in criticism or philosophy.

Isographemic is fine to me. Knowing the roots of the words tells me everything I need to know about this argument. Any other term would probably require more unpacking.

If you’re saying an analog of that, you’re not in the intended audience of the specialized journal Literary Rhetoric and not only didn’t recognize the denotation but also missed the contextual meaning. For example: I can’t say the word “misprison” without summoning up that buffoon Harold Bloom.

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We don’t expect that molecular biologists will write articles about their research that are comprehensible to the general public, except as a secondary task. BoingBoing has highlighted a number of ways in which scientific research is made accessible to the general public, but I don’t think that they’ve ever suggested that “Dance Your Dissertation” should be one’s primary means of communication. In the same way, criticism on literature (while sometimes perfectly accessible) is meant for a specialized and highly trained audience. The goal of this work is to advance the study of literature (which is an esoteric goal, I know), and also to further the understanding of professors and teachers. 

It is part of a professor’s job to understand their field extremely well. Plett’s statement, taken out of context, looks ridiculous when contrasted against everyday language, but it is using a specialized vocabulary that invokes a number of different schools of thought that would not be present were he simply to say “it looks a bit like writing and you can interpret it in a bunch of different ways”. The word polysemous, for example, which means “having the potential of containing multiple meanings”, invokes the philosophical/linguistic school of Semiology which was created by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure asserts that a sign and a signifier (such as a word and the object that the word signifies). 

I understand the argument that academics also have a responsibility to make their work accessible. However, in a critical journal like Literary Rhetoric, this is not the place. That is the place for a community of thinkers to communicate in the language they have created for themselves.

If I focus on the u-shapes.. I see an uplifting smile.

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1905 emoticons.
wikipedia says they were around easily 30 years prior.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#History

So there. A couple seconds of thought about it would have told you that it was far from “wank”, but I guess you just wanted to feel better than the author of the study. 

Or polysemous for that matter, beyond a kind of evocative alingual ambiguity?

I must be missing something.

Edit: hm, now I click the link and read the short spiel, it actually makes perfect sense. Except for ‘isographemic’; that just sounds like wank.

 http://lavape.sourceforge.net/doc/html/FishsNightSong.htm