Seriously, what century is not considered "long"? Do we have any periods of historical development that are couched entirely within the bonds of a century (but bigger than decade, I suppose) and thus get to be a "short" century?

Long eleventh, long twelfth, long thirteenth, I even took a class called English Literature in the Long Fourteenth Century, long fifteenth, long sixteenth...long nineteenth, now a thread about the long twentieth...really? Haven't we longed a couple of those pretty much out of existence?

I've spent the whole week trying to write about ontology (the set of beliefs, experiences, and ways of being-in-the-world that make up a culture's lived reality) without using the words ontology, being-in-the-world, conceptual affordances, or material engagement. (Basically, the article has a reviewer who doesn't read, or think the journal's readership reads, anything produced by writers in the ontological turn in the last ten years. S/he's probably right.)

Writing about theory without using any terminology with soecialized meaninging inside that theory is so difficult, and this has been a frustrating and sometimes angry exercise (ontology isn't 'simple english', reviewer, because it has a specific technical meaning! You didn't tell me to use 'simple English' when describing chemical formulas or statistical tests!).

But, as always, finding a way to talk about theoretical concepts without jargon has made the argument much clearer.

This further convinces me that most problems with the use of theory in history writing aren't caused by the theory itself, but rather the frequent lack of translation (or partial translation) of abstract theory into concrete, yet theory-suffused discussions of the sources.