> And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it ... The more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.

Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)

But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...