It has long been my confirmed belief that the academic style has the same effect on writing as formaldehyde has on living tissue: It turns the keenest insights, the liveliest discussion, the most gripping analysis into unsightly shreds of limp, colorless matter that make your scalp itch just looking at it.

Housman would have called Joachim Wargalla's Analysis of the Competitive Behavior of World-Class Saber Fencers a dish of "particularly dead fish." It's academic jargon at the worst -- or better "wurst," since it is written in the most unreadable idiom of the genre: German Akademisch.

That is to be expected, since it is the secondary publication of Wargalla's Ph.D. dissertation. And it doesn't mean his work does not incorporate aspects that have some value in gaining insights into the conditioned responses of sabreurs imprinted by different national schools.

Wargalla attempts to statistically evaluate and quantify the competitive interaction of top saber fencers. This requires unraveling layers of strategic-tactical information processing and action sequences, various types of physical and mental response, as well as the spontaneous and premeditated selection of attacking or defending target sectors.

Unfortunately, little space is given to some of the most intriguing practical aspects of the study: An analysis of general behavioral traits of Soviet (I take it he used canned samples), French, and Hungarian fencers, such as "weaknesses in defensive actions," "preferred target sector," etc. (Apparently, incorporating a larger sample group was cost prohibitive.)

Wargalla may well have established a generally applicable experimental set-up for empirically analyzing combative behavior and interaction of fencers. It's a pity he buried his insights in a pile of argot that only graduate students will ever have the patience to sift through.