Well, guess what, America? The humanities are also full of difficult concepts—insignificant crap, like the meaning of life—which is why we should acknowledge their need for specialized vocabulary. Difficult concepts sometimes call for big words. Deconstruction is hard. Heidegger is hard. Nietzsche, bless his giant moustache, is hard.

Speaking of which: Alas, Will’s excoriation of lieber Friedrich’s influence is also technically correct, if by accident. In the somewhat obscure, posthumously published essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche attacks the concept of “truth” as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthromorphisms”—before himself launching into several apt metaphors that illustrate why this is the case. A century and change later, Nietzsche’s radical skepticism creeps around the edges of slightly kookier-sounding versions of the same problem, such as when NYU philosophy professor Avital Ronell chides a documentarian for introducing the concept of “meaning” without acknowledging its “fascistoid nonprogressive edges.” But that doesn’t mean Nietzsche didn’t have a point. When, as he said, I write “the stone is hard,” how am I to know that anyone reading is going to conjure the “correct” concepts of “stone” or “hard” in their big fat noggins? I can’t. (Language skepticism. BOOM.) And even if you don’t believe that “meaning” has fascistoid nonprogressive edges—which I don’t, at least I don’t think I do—it’s interesting to talk about why people think it does.

So where, then, does that leave the perpetually maligned users of the term resurgently normative as we transition from the most unabashedly intellectual president in modern history to his satsuma-tinted polar opposite? To demonstrate a utopia under a new class of real intellectuals who properly worship the Western canon without all of that pesky big wordage, one must look no further than that nonofficial inauguration poem you may have seen, which itself may or may not be another fun hoax: