Classes are over, and only one thing stands between you and the freedom of summer: Finals. This week we’ll all be busy prepping, in an attempt to cram an entire semester of reading into a few days of intense study.

After all that time cramming, you may find yourself too tuckered out to actually write those papers, or else struggling to fill that reviled blue book on test day.

Luckily, we’re in college — the home of puffy words which make you sound incredibly intelligent without having to really mean anything at all! We rounded up the best academic jargon you can throw into your papers to boost your final page counts and, just maybe, your GPA. 

Ready? Here we go.

• Transcend
• Discourse
• Synecdochic
• Heteronormative
• Liminal
• Incongruous
• Circumambulate
• Disjunctive
• Framework
• Legitimate (the verb)
• Elucidate
• Obfuscate
• “The Other”
• Marginalization
• Contextualize
• Zenith
• Nadir
• Versimillitude
• Reductive
• Disenfranchise
• Utilize
• Mediated
• Zeitgeist
• Hegemony
• Juxtapose
• Teleological
• Subjugate
• “Spaces”
• Retrenches
• Transgress
• Gestalt
• Dialectic
• Dichotomy
• Manifest
• Anathema
• Reconcile
• Multi-faceted
• Predicated
• Redolent of
• Dearth
• Unequivocal
• Supplant
• Complicates
• Purport
• Circumvent
• Paradigm
• Correlative
• Dissociate
• Contemporaneously
• Bifurcate

Finally, perhaps the king of all academic jargon: Problematize. If you take the time to look up this word in a Mac’s built-in thesaurus (Because who doesn’t spend their free time sifting through thesauri?), you’ll find only this Word Note:

“The blame for this awful neologism lies with academia, where the word serves no apparent purpose except to demonstrate one’s mastery of obscurantist jargon … Some of these words have actually made it into the New Oxford American Dictionary, but that’s no excuse for using them.”

We don’t know what they were talking about. Use them at will.