Kangarooing is using overly academic language to try and explain or discuss concepts to someone who may or may not have a background in academia. Kangarooing happens often in activist circles where middle class college educated people will speak in overly academic language, assuming that the rest of the group is also college educated and can understand them.
Kangarooing is also used to
obfuscate or obscure the point in an attempt to trick the victim into agreeing with something they may not understand, so that they don't seem stupid.
The term is a reference to an episode of the sitcom "Friends" wherein Joey wrote a letter using the thesaurus section on Microsoft Word for every single word and signed the letter as "
Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani".
Judith: "That the power regimes of
heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to
augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be."
Megan: "Stop
kangarooing and explain in standard English please"
