David Foster Wallace: (emphasis mine)
In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an [Academic English] sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” pre-owned,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
From “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” published in Harper’s Magazine, 2001. And that’s not the only good bit. A monstrously tremendous essay.