Annoying buzzwords in academia

We're all familiar with buzzwords in the business world and have threads on the topic often on this board.

I'm reading a copy of As I Lay Dying which I inherited from an English major, who I have to assume is a girl, and it's marked with nonsensical notes and contains many random highlighted passages.

Reading these notes brought me back to a few of the English classes I took while at LSU. In any of these classes you will find a bunch of kids parrotting words they've heard in the course of their Humanities studies, they often do not have a grasp on how said words are to be used; if, heaven forbid, they actually do know how to use it- said word will be used in nearly every point they make about anything. These people, more often than not, are the most outspoken in any given class discussion and usually are just forcing a heaping helping of word salad on their peers.

Some of the buzzwords popular with wanna-be intellectuals in the world of undergraduate Humanities courses:

Tomes
Archetype
Secular
Denouement
Assonance
Exegesis
Syntax
Motif
Aesthetics
Didactic
Catharsis
Petrarchan conceit
Conventions
Trope


And perhaps most consistently- not knowing the difference between an allegory, a metaphor, symbolism, and a simile.

Now I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with these words- they can be very useful when writing a paper and used properly/in the right context- but when you get some airhead spitting out four of these in each sentence it just comes across as total blather. If you use more than two of any of the above words in one spoken sentence, you're doing it wrong.

Anyone have any similiar experiences? What are some words you hear misused a lot by students in your classes?