Fissiparous

adj. inclined to cause or undergo division into separate parts or groups.

I am indebted to Alison Shell, Prof of Early Modern Studies at UCL, who caused me to look up this word which is entirely new to me. I'm having difficulty deciding if I like it or not but I'm tending towars a mild hostility. I'm delighted that the word exists and I'm glad that not everybody yet is aiming their language at an audience with a reading age in single figures, as I believe it has been demonstrated that Donald Trump does, although that may not be his fault. He might be doing his best.
But I think it distils the experience of six months reading the TLS into one word. That it is trying a bit too hard, that it unnecessarily seems to congratulate itself on its much-vaunted erudition and is self-conscious in its learned, slightly stilted way. I've found plenty of interest in it, much that makes me glad that there are people caring and writing about esoteric subjects that I didn't even know were there, but not often enough have I been excited by it.
This week's edition seems to be a special that carries several pages of adverts for 'Learned Journals' but is it for them to say how learned they are or is it gently ironic like the courtroom courtesy of addressing professionals as 'm'learned friend'. I must admit I'm tempted by the James Joyce Quarterly but not quite so much by The Journal of the London Institute of Pataphysics. And, yes, I will have to look up 'pataphysics'
Somewhere among the summer book reviews was a book in defence of pretentiousness, and why not, it's not always a bad thing to be accused of and the charge is often brought by someone who doesn't get it. And so I am not going to distance myself too far from Prof. Shell's lexicon. Her vocabulary is wider than mine and I don't feel too intimidated by that. But if I had 'fissiparous' available to me and it seemed like the right word, I'm still not sure I'd use it.
But I tried to TLS crossword for the first time last night and came within a respectable distance of finishing it and so am gratified to think that I might be part of its target audience although if it's possible to be fissiparous on my own, I might eventually divide into a separate group and get the LRB instead.