Begging the question of the ding an sich

Don't people realize that misusing pretentious terms makes them sound like not just bores, but ignorant bores?

Take, for example, the term "beg the question." Most of my friends have had to suffer through my ranting about how annoying and pretentious it is to misuse this phrase as a flowery way of saying "raise the question," when really it has a precise rhetorical meaning: to employ circular logic. Whenever I come across its misuse in an article I stop reading, because I know the writer is sloppy and unreliable.

Or take Joan Acocella's egregious and gratuitous misuse of Kant in this New Yorker book review:

But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice—a Ding an sich, and proud of it.

First of all, barf. What a pretentious sentence. Was she just overcompensating because she was writing about Playboy, so she thought a bit of Kant would justify her whimsical, oh-so-outré subject matter?

Second, I just don't understand what she was trying to say. Ding an sich means thing-in-itself and is a reference to Kant, for whom it means the noumenon, that which the human mind can never perceive directly but only through the phenomenon, the world as experienced. So it is almost the opposite of artifice (well, sort of, though really it concerns a totally unrelated epistemological question of the categories with which the mind orders raw sense data).

I think what Acocella meant was that what had started as an approximation of nature became a goal in itself. The simulacrum became that which is simulated. That is a somewhat interesting observation. But that has nothing to do with Kant, and it certainly doesn't excuse her archly pretentious (mis)use of the German phrase.

Simple language is almost always so much better.