The accusation that someone's argument is a meaningless jumble of complex or academic-sounding words strung together to sound profound while deliberately conveying no coherent position. It suggests the speaker is using jargon as a smokescreen to hide a lack of substance, confuse the audience, or appear intelligent without actually making a defensible point. Playing this card is a way to dismiss verbose or theoretically dense arguments by claiming they are semantically null—linguistic garbage posing as insight.
Example: In a philosophy debate, someone says, "The ontological precarity of the subjective experience is merely a dialectical shadow of the hegemonically constructed phenomenological field." A critic might reply, "Stop dealing the word salad card. Say that in English or admit you have no actual point." This accuses the speaker of hiding behind complexity instead of communicating clearly.
by Abzugal February 3, 2026
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