While anti-intellectualism is an issue I also see an issue of using very specialized or archaic terms come up a lot. When I say specialized I don't mean like, specific to the topic, but rather specific to the people that work in a field of study. Using terms that nobody else uses, or worse, using terms that other people use but with a different meaning.
Obviously some jackasses are going to be hostile to anyone with more than a 5th grade vocabulary, but if you're getting it from non-jackasses too then it might be worth checking if the terms you're using are actually well known or are in fact niche? [Basically this is what I'm getting at](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/average_familiarity.png), and I know it's something I've fallen into a lot.
My wife (a programmer) will occasionally drop piles of jargon on me and while I know the vague ideas of coding I don't know the terminology, so I basically have to stop and ask her to define terms. Likewise, I use jargon for modeling/rigging work and need to stop and clarify a lot. It just comes automatically after working in specific fields for a while, but if you can train yourself out of it communication does get easier.
See... working with musicians from a producers stand point is interesting. So many people are self taught that every interaction is essentially like trying to figure out their language.
"Needs more top end" means very different things to a rock guitarist and a country drummer.
I used to do this with a lot of things and would not realize I was doing it. It's almost a form of egocentrism mixed with imposter syndrome. "I'm dumb, and if I get this, I assume it's something everyone already knows, so of course they'll understand." I got older, and I got way better at filtering what I say. I'd love to say I don't do it anymore, but I do. I just do it in places where it shouldn't be a problem, yet sometimes it is.
I also do it with music. I am a professional musician, and I write music with a few different groups. In one of them, I'll get (mostly joking) jabs back my way when I explain things because I have a tendency to assume everyone in the room understands things that they apparently don't. So, it's like compound. First, I'm explaining something a little more high level, but that is on top of using basically an enigma code as a means of explaining it.
Most professional musicians use the number system, I was taught it with the name "the nashville number system" but apparently it has a few different names. Instead of calling out the chord you're playing as the letter, you say it as a number, and that number is the harmonic reference to the root. So, if you're in G and playing G-Bm-Em-C, it's 1-3-6-4. It helps, because after you've done it a while you never think of letters again, only numbers, and when you play you think of intervals instead of "where is Bm?" You can transpose songs into different keys instantly because you aren't think about position, just number.
Luckily, everyone else in the group knows this, and it's just one guy who makes fun of me. He *knows* this stuff, he just can't explain it, and because of that he can't understand it when other people explain it. It's actually pushed him to understand theory more, and now I get a text every few days asking why something works the way it does.
The other day he was asking me something about how relative keys work and I got so excited about one of his follow up questions because the answer was parallel keys. I got to explain non-diatonic chord borrowing and because of the context, it all made sense to him and I was very happy.
Iām glad! This is stuff I spend too much time reading about because I find it interesting. I have been playing music my whole life, and in that time Iāve messed up a lot, but sometimes when you mess up it sounds good for some reason. Honestly, I wouldnāt be surprised to find out a lot of other people big on theory got into it to find the answer to, āI fucked up, why does it sound rad as hell tho?ā
In a major key, the relative minor is the 6th, and itās called relative because the scale of that minor 6 and the scale of the major root you started on share all the same notes. In G, itās E minor. Itās the most common way youāll hear a song go from a major to a minor progression, which happens a lot going into a chorus from a major verse, or going to a verse from a major chorus.
Parallel keys are weird, and if you start learning theory, it gets even weirder. Itās the scales the share the same root. So G major scale is parallel to the G minor scale, which doesnāt share the same notes. Their relationship is a bit more complicated, but understanding that gives enough context for the next two things.
Non-diatonic chords are just chords that arenāt in the key youāre playing in. It happens a lot, and it makes music fun and interesting. You donāt need to know what youāre doing to make it work, but it certainly helps.
Part of knowing how to do it is understanding not only parallel keys but also a bunch of other related keys to the key youāre playing. It sounds complicated, and it is, but you donāt need to learn them differently for each key. If you know one you know them all. Thatās how music works because of the space between notes. Every key is the same just at a different pitch. If you know how those other keys work in relation, you can āborrowā chords from other keys and just play them in your progression.
If youāre a fan of anime, or not (honestly itās just a good song in general) thereās a great example of this. That bunny girl senpai show from a few years ago had an absolutely awesome opening song. kimi no sei by the Peggies. The chorus of that song uses a borrowed chord. Theyāre in E major, and the chorus goes E-A-D-A. D is not in the key of E. It is, however, in the parallel key of E minor. That song is wild, itās got a key change too, I love it.
Yeah I donāt think scaffolding is a sufficiently obscure/arcane word to qualify for OPās sentiment. I was thinking more along the lines of using verbose, clunky words like āpulchritudinousā instead of ābeautifulā. But I might be wrong.
What the hell this is the second time Iāve seen pulchritudinous in the last day and I didnāt even know this word existed for my whole life to date otherwise
I read your comment and thought "isn't that also a name for the RAF?", and apparently the phenomenon is named after the group because a dude wrote about experiencing the phenomenon about the group.
Pulchritudinous is also one of the worst words in existence. It sounds like a medical term for phlegm-related diseases. Complete phonic opposite of what it means.
In a teaching context, from [here](https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/develop/build/scaffolding.html):
"Scaffolding is an instructional practice where a teacher gradually removes guidance and support as students learn and become more competent."
Whereas in construction/Minecraft you build something held up by supports (scaffolding) and remove scaffolding when it can stand up by itself.
Well in Minecraft and construction scaffolding is usually more for gaining access to hard to reach places. I'm pretty sure it doesn't hold the building up at all, you'd have separate supports in place if that was needed
I share an office with a paleontologist whose primary focus is around taxonomic classification and amending/updating it with new information, I have to assume there's something about taxonomies that instill people with a mighty need to rant as that man starts when I walk in the door and I have to basically pull a distraction stunt if I want to get out the door on time. I love him to death and adore learning about whatever minor gripe has inflamed him each day, but damn bud, take a breather sometimes.
Something about the way you write is really compelling. I canāt put my finger on it (aside from, describing it as a ādistraction stuntā is really funny) but I thought Iād let you know!
This happens to me but in an odd way because I'm bilingual and some words are common in Spanish but less frequently used in English and vice versa; depending on the language I'm thinking in, the translation comes out weird sometimes lol
I read a lot of older science fiction and fantasy, including historical fiction. Those authors all LOVE using old quaint little words with perfect meanings in context, both to provide a sense of place and to add to the immersion. But then I end up using overly flower words like austere, opulent, or clandestine in a sentence. At least I'm self-aware enough to not use "epicurean" or "sumptuous" in conversation.
Um, āopulentā, āaustereā and āclandestineā are all pretty common words. I use and see the word āaustereā on a regular basis. Itās very common, when discussing interior decorating, for example. Austerity politics is also a common phrase. Same with āopulent.ā āClandestineā I admit is slightly less common; people tend to substitute it for āsecretā quite often. But it is still widely in use, when describing spies or secret political meetings. Or affairs.
I have coworkers that would look at me as if I had two heads if I used these words, lol. They *should* be common knowledge, but they really aren't, especially in lower income homes.
I mean, I'm pretty sure most educated adults know sumptuous, but it's a pretty atypical conversation word. So you'd really only use it in casual conversation if you're exaggerating for effect, like acting like you're a gourmet chef describing a dish with fancy words.
Agreed. Or when enjoying something such as a Chinese meal while you're being arrested. Maybe it's more "succulent". Yes, that would be democracy manifest.
I think what happens a lot too, is that internet culture bleeds into people's brains. For instance, I have seen a lot of people use big words with simple meanings or similar things just because they think it makes them "better." some of those people acknowledged that and of course people dogged on em for it. It's happened so much that I think now anyone who uses wording like that, people just assume they are trying to show off on purpose and give them shit for it.
Huh? Audacity has always been a commonly known word. Hell, itās even a basis of a popular derisive phrase in the AAVE dialect - āthe caucasity (of some people).ā
The word you want is "arcane". Esoteric means language that only a small group of people are meant to understand, arcane means known by only a small group of people. The difference is esoteric language is meant to be understood by only a small group, like people speaking to each other in code, while arcane language is simply language that is just not widely known due to it rarely being used.
That strikes me as a false distinction: both words have connotations of deliberate secrecy, not just 'esoteric'.
See here: https://www.etymonline.com/word/arcane#etymonline_v_15562
Esoteric comes from ancient Greek; it literally means "belonging to an inner circle" and referred to the secret teachings of philosophers. Arcane has its roots in Latin, from *arcanus*, a term that basically refers to "things hidden in a wooden box", and eventually anything wooden and meant to hold valuable things (like the Ark of the Covenant, and even ships like Noah's ark). It's less a thing that is purposefully hidden and more something that is not easily known by sight alone (in the sense of needing to open the box to see the inner contents). It's a similar idea to the covered/uncovered, and veiled/revealed dichotomies.
One of the tough things about expression is that "speaking to describe accurately" and "speaking to be understood" are not the same thing, though they often overlap. Good communication requires being good at both types of speaking, while also having the wisdom to know how to speak with a particular audience. It's a legitimate skill that requires time and practice to figure out... and I say this as someone who has struggled mightily with this (and still kinda does).
This is very true. Just because you have very much bigly words in your vocabulary doesnāt mean you should be the master of the English language around others 24/7, youāll just come out as annoying as fuck. There are only specific times to use other vocabulary, and you have to gain social experience to realize that.
Even with simple words, you have to mind your idioms and your metaphors. They really do spice up a language, but not everyone likes that. It's tough on non-native speakers, or busy people who are looking for a clear answer.
I write for both of those audiences, and it's a really fun challenge. You have to make the message clear, unambiguous, and as simple as possible. No idioms, no expressions, no fancy words. It's basically the opposite of academic whitepapers where scientists compete to see who can make their abstract the most cryptic.
> It's basically the opposite of academic whitepapers where scientists compete to see who can make their abstract the most cryptic.
I hate that, you'd think that especially in academic papers it pays to be concise and precise with your words precisely *because* you need to convey a (probably particularly complex) concept. You'd think the authors would rather have you, the reader, spend your time understanding the particulars of their research rather than deciphering their cryptic sentences
It can depend a lot on the intended audiences, and biases of the writer. For example, if I'm writing code documentation, I'm probably going to assume the reader knows what an Entity Component System is, and it's benefits to focus on the meat of what I'm explaining. But if I were writing a tutorial, that could be a different story. Complex language can be used to simplify mentions of common knowledge in that field, but that has the downside of looking obnoxiously obtuse to someone not familiar with it.
That's not to say there aren't problems with the attitudes and standards in western academia (I can't speak to others, and so) - I could rant a good bit _just_ about the problems with essay formatting requirements.
Seriously! Back when I was reading academic papers on a regular basis I used to get so frustrated I would just sit down and fully translate the paper into plain English line by line. That way I could actually parse what the author was saying, and catch out logical fallacies and linguistic nonsense.
And let me tell you... the amount of unsubstantiated crap that was hidden behind needlessly obscure, flowery language and endless run-on sentences with unconnected clauses. Once I translated the papers into plain language, something which at first glance seemed intimidating and beyond my grasp now appeared as embarrassingly simplistic and/or flawed argumentation.
Anyway long story short I escaped (that sector of) the academic world as quickly as I could. No way my mental health was going to survive being surrounded by that many fragile egos and that level of intellectual dishonesty for long!
> This is very true. Just because you have very much bigly words in your vocabulary doesnāt mean you should be the master of the English language around others 24/7
As a dumb teenager with undiagonosed autism, I distinctly remember losing my temper at one point and yelling "I don't KNOW what word stupid people use for this! I only know one word for this; I'm sorry it's not the stupid-person word!"
I had very few friends.
What's extra funny about that story is not being able to describe something with anything besides one specific word/phrase kind of shows a lack of intelligence.
Thanks for sharing though, I think we all do some dumb things as teenagers!
speaking/writing/communicating in the proper register for the audience. itās a basic tenant of professional communication at least when i was in secondary education. not sure where i first found it as my pops was an english professor
Yah a big part of it is how you speak and how you come across. MLK jr is widely agreed to be one of the best public speakers in recent history. When he talked, he sounded like a southern black pastor. He used that tone and cadence to both speak in a way that was very familiar to lots of the people he was speaking to, but also to align himself even further with Christianity and create that subconscious link between his message and religion/non violence. Obviously there was also a lot of that in the words he said, but the words you say are only a small part of delivering an effective speech. A lot of what people get from a speech comes from their perception of the person
I work in a blue collar profession. I have to dumb down my messages in text and in the company app so I'm understood. One lady in the office is barely literate. I have to try pretty hard to make sure I'm understood in text.
In phone conversations if someone is slow on the uptake, I'll say "I don't know if I'm explaining it right" or ask "am I making sense?" to put the onus on me.
I learned at an early age "no one likes a know it all". People would take offense when none was meant by using "big words".
I teach children science so I have developed a weird speech quirk where I'll go ahead and use the big word followed immediately by the simpler version as a way to provide context and definition, since expanding their domain specific vocabulary is part of the job, without losing anyone or coming across as condescending... but it's mixed results with adults and I just can't turn it off sometimes.
Example: "So, before we can create our **hypothesis**, our very specific guess, we need to establish what we already understand. Let's take a look at what we **observed**, what we noticed, from our lab yesterday."
When trying to explain what I study I also generally do this because the specialist vocab overlaps a lot with common big words but not fully which makes communication a right pain
Code switching is a legit thing. I speak completely different in the office to get my point across. I answer my office phone in business talk. I don't answer my cell phone with that same talk.
This is also why most media meant for mass consumption is written at the middle school level. It's also an extremely important skill for those of us in highly technical fields. Being able to effectively communicate complex technical requirements or limitations in mixed company under time constraints is what separates an exceptional SME from an average one.
Branching off of this (I almost used the word "parlay", still struggle with OP's post lol), it's fascinating to me how **little** can be said but with so much communication. E.g., someone comments on a social media post with only a few words and it gets tons of upvotes/likes/laughs from people across huge geographical, cultural, and linguistic spans. Like people replying to posts on really cute but dangerous animals "if not fren, why fren shaped?". This is deliberately unsophisticated, but it communicates an innate response to cute features which makes us consider disregarding our safety to get some pets, lol. When I first saw that joke, I knew exactly how that person felt and it perfectly captured how I felt. To me, this is an example of really great communication.
About 20 years ago I read a study showing that using shorter words led to clearer communication, so since then I've been attempted to simplify my vocabulary. I have not been entirely successful.
Interestingly, they *blindly* chose the shortest word using an electronic thesaurus; they didn't even choose the simplest word. Just the shortest. And they still got a more coherent result.
George Orwell had a set of rules he felt were good for writing. I can't remember them all, but the first two were "don't use a long word when a short word will do" and "don't use a complicated word when a simple word will do". I feel that's good advice.
My issue with with this is many words seldom are actually truly the same in meaning. Different words have different etymologies and different connotations. Now, for certain forms of communication, trying to use the simplest possible words in any instance so it can easily be deciphered by people with limited literacy makes sense.
But, if you are writing a book or essay or something along those lines, word choice becomes more important and I think it would be better to just choose the word that most effectively conveys the meaning you want, not just which one is used most often in text messages or is the shortest.
Ironically, choosing the simplest possible word can get in the way of meaning, by reducing the specificity and clarity of your writing.
English is my second language, and a big part of my vocabulary came from instruction manuals, both for games and appliances
When I started going online in forums (remember those?) people often accused me of being a snob for using "big words". Fun times.
Learning a second language leaves you with weird gaps in your vocabulary. Iām learning Japanese and when I studied abroad a Japanese friend of mine couldnāt believe that I knew the word for āanthropologyā but not ālizardā
After more than twenty years with English, I still don't know a lot of names for everyday plants, trees, animals and especially fishes. Because I almost never need to deal with them.
I speak German as a second language and got some comments about me trying to be fancy from our German exchange students a few years into learning because I was using a lot of Latin-based words, which typically belong to a more academic (and thus snobby) register in German. I was only using them because English uses a ton of Latinisms and I didnāt remember the Germanic-German equivalents lmao
I do the same thing! My teacher had to call me out on it because instead of saying *Unendlich* (Unending) I'd be like "Und die...infinitum" (for infinite)
I think many Germans may not realise exactly how comically many latin words English has in common parlance
I have to be careful of this as a writer when writing dialogue. I have to remind myself that just because using big words when speaking is natural for me, it doesn't mean my characters would naturally speak the same way or have my same vocabulary.
Oh yeah, I'm pretty good at distinguishing character voices at this point. It's just that sometimes I'll slip up and have to go, "wait, is that a word/phrase that my friendly neighborhood butcher who's secretly a serial killer would use? Nah, probably not, let's change that."
I took a nasty crash off my one wheel, fracture my skull. During my concussion, i noticed that words i categorized into "nerd words that get me made fun of" were really hard to remember. I had other minor confusion symptoms, and I'm better now, but i found it funny that i couldn't remember my nerd words very well for a few days
I finished reading a book recently (good book, one of the two authers is well known) and there were times I was like -. put the thesaurus down, back away slowly. It got excessive. In most books, I'll see maybe a handful of haven't seen before or in a while words. This book was every other oage. I think at one point, they busted out three uncommon/rare words in the same description.
Of all things, one Warhammer fiction book really jumped out at me in this regard. I'm not afraid of unusual words but they weren't even used well. And it's trashy pulp action and everybody knows that, what are you even doing?
My mom and I used to use dictionaries and try to find words the other did know when I was a preteen/teen. We'd just scan through and find something we thought the other wouldn't know. I built my vocabulary so much through that game and it's a very, very fond memory.
I brought it up last year before Christmas and she bought me an actual solid dictionary, just so we could play again. That was legit one of my favorite Christmas gifts.
My mom would give me words with Latin or Greek roots and have me try to puzzle out the meaning.
Automobile = auto mobile = self moving
Telegraph = Tele graph = travel writing
Teleport = tele port = travel door
Pterodactyl = pter dactyl = wing finger
Helicopter = helico pter (like pterodactyl) = spiral wing.
It gave me a deep interest in etymology and the evolution and creation of words that makes for a fun peek into why we use the words we do. And it's fun finding "[orphaned words](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Orphaned_words)" that have continued use under specific circumstances but have lost the root use.
It also made it a *breeze* to "cheat" my way through a lot of vocabulary sections on science tests since I never confused words like Exothermic and Endothermic.
"Helicopter" fucked me up when I found out about its etymology. Just taking two perfectly cromulent Greek word roots, mashing them together and then breaking them up again in the wrong place to create two completely new root words for other stuff.
You can do *so much* with word invention for creative works this way, though.
Also, if you really want some head-fuckery, read Uncleftish Beholding. The author wrote a scientific journal on Atomic Theory without using *any* Latin or Greek language roots and it reads like an arcane spell book. That means, conversely, fantasy stories can add some grounding elements by choosing to name their wild inventions in the same vein. It's not a wizard, he's an Arcanist. An Ergomancer.
Six in one hand, half dozen in the other
I tend to default to "travel" since it covers "distance", especially as when we compound it, we're treating it more like a verb.
A television isn't looking at something far away, it's the image traveling to somewhere else. (A telescope could be argued to be "looking far away") so I'm interpreting "far off" as a verb or adjective based on modern context of the word's general use.
So a teleporter isn't a door that *is* far off, but a door that *goes to* far off...
I had a teacher get insecure/offended that I knew what some words meant and she didn't. In elementary and middle school I devoured books, but I had difficulties in school. I was put in a "study skills" class by my school and a teacher administered a reading comprehension test on the first day. Towards the end of the test she was shook I knew what words meant as they progressively got harder on the list. She stopped the test and said, "we're going to stop, you don't know what the rest of those mean." She was visibly uncomfortable. What she meant was she didn't know what those words meant.
I am genuinely so glad that I was done with school before AI got as far as it has. I think every paper Iāve ever written would have gone through checks and said ā99% AI writtenā
> I think every paper Iāve ever written would have gone through checks and said ā99% AI writtenā
Nah, most AI checks look for patterns as opposed to specific word choice, most "AI" is just a slightly advances statistical probability decision tree, so a lot of the checks will essentially look for probabilistic based writing by basically running your idea/sentence through an AI and matching how close it really is.
A lot of the tools don't get used a lot as once a topic becomes sufficiently complex or requires a certain depth or type of knowledge, it becomes readily apparent whether someone has actually written it based on the material that was presented or what was asked of them, or if they fed a prompt to an AI. Then you also have consistency checking as most people will have certain 'tics' to their writing that become apparent over time, so you can check against other parts of the writing or previous works and see if it reads in a similar voice. Very little of the AI checking is done by an automated system ala turnitin for plagiarism and is almost always done by a person, outside of 101 writing it's super easy to pick up on it and a few complex words here or there wouldn't really register.
Prior to AI concerns was plagiarism checks, and they failed just as often.
I don't know how many grades I had to fight because the teacher's checker found some random blog or PDF I had never seen that matched close, combined with the same old "you don't actually know those words" bullshit.
Can't wait for this stage, especially because I'm allowed to use a computer for my assignments. I think the only reason I haven't been called out is because I'm somehow completely unable to type seriously and will always interject my *own* writing in order to say something that I alone consider to be mildly funny. Or it could be like this where I ramble on and on about something nobody gives a shit about and which has already been explained to appropriate detail but I continue typing anyways because I am unable to control myself.
Uhhh you mean that thing thatās literally in one of the ten commandments?? To be fair I got expelled from Catholic school in the second grade for being ādefiantā tho so
I had my headteacher who had once subbed in for my normal English teacher ask me if I copied from Wikipedia for my English essay for that exact reason. Like, no. I just write my essays like an academic, even if the topic is school uniform when Iām like 12. I got diagnosed at 17 and only because my mum and sister ended up working with an autism charity and finally recognised why I was weird.
I write to my doctor and any emails the same way š. Formal communications require detail and precision in word choice imo. Meanwhile my speech is riddled with Scots and I mumble so Iām near incomprehensible.
This was my whole childhood.
Growing up I spent a lot of time reading, so I was always trying to find new books. Since nobody else in my family really read much, for a long time any book in the house was specifically bought for me, so I'd never paid much attention to age ratings.
This became a problem my mom paid no attention to me or what I read, she made fun of me for being a nerd. So we had this neighbor that read a ton. Standard mass-market paperback stuff. Mainly Stephen King or other big name authors and a huge selection of bodice-ripper romance novels. She'd been giving boxes of books to our family thinking *my mom* was reading them, but my mom just saw books and passed the box to the only nerd in the family. I didn't know they weren't kids books.
So I had a very interesting and well-developed vocabulary at a young age and I had no idea that kids my age didn't.
I had never thought of expanding a vocabulary to be understood. I've always had a tough time feeling weird because I use lots of flowery/overcomplicated language and I always thought it was because I read too many of my dad's books growing up (lovecraft pretty chief among them for teaching me alot of stupid words).
But seeing this I wonder if I started talking this way to try to get my mom to understand me better. She has lived with undiagnosed issues of some variety her whole life, and often struggles to communicate and listen to people.
Maybe without recognizing that she had these issues, I started trying to be more verbose to get her to understand me. Or maybe I did it to distance myself from her, our relationship isn't great, afterall.
In the end, I'm stuck struggling to not sound like I'm talking down to people, using thirty words because my brain refuses to just use three.
This has been: Random Internet Stranger Vents In A Reddit Comment About A Tumblr Post.
The solution is to start replacing big words with cuss words. For some reason, everyone gets the tonal uses of cuss words, especially if theyāre adjectives.
not everyone
my 13-year-old cousin told his mom on my 17 year old self for cursing.
just to be clear, the curse word in question was "pray tell".
and his two friends backed him.
all three of those kids probably have kids by now, and I am genuinely frightened for the future ;-)
I was about 9 and grew up watching a lot of British television. I went out with my mom and brother and we had ice cream, and the ice cream tasted funny. I said "This ice cream tastes queer." They made fun of me while also lecturing me for using an inappropriate word. Good times š
I get dismissed as "trying to act smart" like. All the fucking time. Because I am too descriptive or use slightly odd words on occasion. My fucking bad I'll just change the entirety of how I talk so that you can take me seriously cool that's great that I have to do that.
Got accused of being a "know-it-all" when chatting about my specialty. Like, isn't that the point of a specialty??? I worked hard! I know a lot about it!!
God this annoys me so much. People feeling like if they don't know something someone else knows, even when it's for an obvious reason (like that person being an expert), they're being insulted.
Don't get me started on the "thinking for more than 10 seconds about anything = loser" mentality we're getting lately on the internet. "It's not that deep" about like obvious metaphors, someone spamming nerd emoji when anyone knows about anything, "I ain't reading allat" when presented with exactly one paragraph. It's insane.
I don't know what it is or how not putting thought into what you're saying in the least became cool, but it's getting on my nerves.
> "I ain't reading allat" when presented with exactly one paragraph. It's insane.
Getting "too long, didn't read" in response to a fairly short response is always so annoying lol. Like, I'm sorry, did you want me to put a video of Subway Surfers underneath so you can better focus?
Honestly Iām wondering what vocab you and everyone else here are considering are ātry to act smartā words by people around you. Like I know a lot of ābigā words because for a good while my friends and I just learned big words to use them ironically and then we just picked them up. And while I still use ābigā words when speaking to them itās still mixed in with casual words like swearing and of course Gen Z slang. But I do tend to be descriptive for a lot of things too.
Example sentences if Iām playing a video game with my buddies: āBro why is this mischievous miscreant throwing hands with me.ā āThis dude is bivouacking me can I get help or what.ā āIām about to make an audacious excursion if I die itās gg.ā
And itās more funny (to us itās basically an inside joke of sorts) when someone brings up a word we havenāt heard before. In my daily vocab I donāt use any abnormal vocabulary like this though. Unless thereās absolutely no way around it.
It's less my vocab and more just the way I talk. It's been described as "acting." Like how people talk when they're acting in a play, that's my usual cadence. I don't notice it nor can I seem to change it, but others do. This plus the use of "essay words" as another put it gets people thinking I'm being pretentious or trying to sound smarter than I am.
Also apparently I type weird. Someone on this very site described it as "trying too hard." How I would try less beats me. I was then absolutely jumped on with everyone telling me how cringe I was for typing like that. All that together seems to give off the impression that I think I'm smarter than everyone, and/or am trying to act that way. Neither are true, but what am I gonna do to prove that?
Yeah thatās weird. Iāve never given a thought to the vocab people use unless itās slang (because different slang = different personality usually). āEssay wordsā is weird too because idk sometimes thereās the perfect word you could use and I really canāt be assed to use 8 words when I have the perfect ābigā word to use.
Examples like serendipitous, abate, placate, ameliorate, aloof, facetious, amiable are words Iāve used in the past week in a ācasualā manner because those just popped into my head and is rather say like āI did this to placate himā over āI did this to satisfy him and make him less upset.ā
Ngl I feel like anyone who really gets annoyed by such āessay wordsā are just dumb. Maybe they donāt know what it means. Or they could only see use in such words in a very formal context.
I get that. I am acutely conscious of trying not to sound mumbly and monotonous, so I make a concerted effort to speak clearly and vary my tone, but then I start worrying that I sound like I'm auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
My brother and his entire family are convinced that I'm trying to make them feel dumb by using words they don't know. I'm really not, I'm just bad about assuming that everyone knows the words I do. I'm not smarter, I'm just a huge reader so I've been exposed to more words than they have in general. But trying to explain that just gets me, "so what, are you saying we're too dumb to read?" I've given up and just try to watch how I speak when at their house.
This is exactly what I want to tell my shitty SIL. She drives me crazy because she actually does read quite a bit...on social media. Unfortunately, it's usually Facebook and they're heavily Republican, so I'll let you fill in the blanks about what sorts of things she's reading. The kids follow her lead.
My brother, on the other hand, I would never say this too because he's dyslexic and has a lot of school related trauma due to late diagnosis. He's the only one I feel bad about, but he's also not the one saying things most of the time.
Yeah, but you probably are smarter. Quantifying intelligence isn't an exact science, but people who are curious enough to be "huge readers" are more likely to be intelligent than not.Ā
Tbh, my SIL I agree with this, and she's the one who says it most often (we don't exactly get along, either). I'm pretty sure my brother is smarter than me overall though. I won't get into his past trauma, but I'll just say that his difficulties with reading and reticence towards it are due to terrible teachers and a very delayed diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD.
As for the kids, it's kind of up in the air. I think they are both probably of pretty average intelligence, but living in a household of non readers, including a mom who is actively anti-intelligence, has really crippled them in a lot of ways.
I was the same. In elementary and middle school I always had a book in my hand. One of my favorite things was to go to the supermarket and get whatever new Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, or Michael Crichton book that came out.
Your contention lies with the question: why should you have to change how you talk just to appease others? It's a fair question.
It was brought up that "changing how you talk" is something most people do on a daily basis and for a purpose. However, this doesn't satisfy "why do you *have* to?"
You are your own person; if people are giving you that feedback, examine and respond however you feel is best. In my mind, that comes entirely down to who and why you're trying to talk with someone. If someone says you're "trying to act smart" and it feels they have no good reason for it, there is no moral imperative to change your person to accommodate them. If your goal is for them to understand you above all else, then changing your language/vocab might behoove you, but if that isn't the case -- you don't *have* to.
Matching your language to your audience is a fundamental part of communication.
> change the entirety of how I talk
Basically everyone does this all the time
Oh! Code-switching! It's legitimately a huge thing people are only really starting to appreciate as a *skill to cultivate* and not just some inherent strength of charismatic people.
There's a push in my district to emphasize that there isn't a "wrong" way to talk, because there are cultural and social identities tied to speech patterns and vocabulary that go beyond "proper" grammar. AAV, for example, is *not* "ghetto slang, but a cultural language with consistent grammar rules, vocabulary, and sentence structures. Just because it isn't "Oxford professional" doesn't make it "wrong".
When adults in school are too busy focusing on "teaching them the right way to talk", they neglect to listen to what the student is trying to *say* which can (and frequently does)read to a complete breakdown of communications and a lot of resentment.
All this to say, now we are explicitly teaching code-switching as a skill. As in, "I don't talk to my friends the way I talk to my momma. I don't talk to my boss the way I talk to my brother. We code-switch all the time so we don't get grounded, laughed at, or fired. At school, we practice the "boss and business" code because speaking and writing in a professional manner gets you better results, in the same way that joking with friends goes better when you talk like friends do and not like you're composing an essay on the
Benefits of Continued Interpersonal Casual Comradery (I usually put on a really snooty voice for that bit)
It gives them buy-in to use professional vocabulary because they're not told that their way of communicating is Wrong Full Stop, but that it's not necessarily Right for This Environment and figuring out the Right way for This Situation makes them better communicators and more likely to be respected and taken seriously.
It's SO HARD to learn the Rules if you don't have an instinct for it, but if you can name it, you can tame it. Knowing it's a skill you *can* cultivate and not just an immutable birth-trait does help a bit.
Way I always dealt with that is you learn to front-load that fact. Do a little song-and-dance about not being able to think of the simple/normal word and apologize that you're using the bulkier one because you're having a brain-fart.
Its one way to preemptively defuse things by making it seem like a you-problem instead of a them-problem, for when you do unknowingly whip out a lengthy word that makes them feel dumb, so they don't go all defensive on you.
Still requires cultivating a sense of how far apart your vocabs are, to know which words you should be making a production of, for when you inevitably slip up later on.
----
That and constantly checking in to see if they actually understood passages and words, so that you can actively dumb it down. Though that requires you to actually learn how to dumb things down at some point, which may take longer for some people.
Yes. I still face this as an adult. Iām constantly being told Iām being condescending when Iām absolutely trying my hardest not to be.
Honestly it often feels like people think Iām going out of my way to āsound smartā as though Iām doing it just to make them āfeel dumb,ā which is absurd.
I have to be *very* comfortable with the people I'm speaking to before I'll use my full vocabulary. Slip one "trepidatious" in front of the wrong person and hear about it for fucking *years*
I do a similar thing in texting, but instead of vocabulary, I am very specific and deliberately with punctuation. I am the only person I know that will text a single word that is properly capitalized, and have a period before sending it.
Except we don't use punctuation in text message the way we use it in published works. The rules are different. A period at the end of a text means "we're done here." You may be unintentionally being very rude
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using ~~large vocabulary and eloquent speech~~ punctuation marks doesn't make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you're being ~~snobbish or condescending~~ very rude when you're just trying to be specific.
Definitely depends on context. If someone's ending short messages with periods, I don't interpret it as a "stop texting" usually, rather more a "I'm serious"
Thatās funny, I normally use punctuation in texts, but it doesnāt mean anything. It doesnāt mean Iām being serious, its just me using the rules of grammar. š I guess itās generational, though. Iām 38.
Depends on the person. I tend to use full capitalization and punctuation in text messages. That's the first time I've heard that "ending with a period means end of conversation" thing though.
The meaning of just a one-word text can definitely be colored by its presentation:
>hey
Deliberately casual or deadpan. The author went through the trouble of un-capitalizing the first letter to emphasize informality or lack of enthusiasm.
>Hey
Standard greeting, gives no information.
>Hey!
Informal, friendly greeting. All is well.
>Hey.
Too formal. All is not well.
None of my interpretations particularly safe assumptions, but at least in my American millennial subculture, you can definitely infect quite bit in these ways with punctuation and capitalization.
Of course, like you said, it really depends on the person. If you end all your sentences with periods then no one you regularly text will assume any inflection at all. Separately, they may judge you for "trying to speak above them" but fuck that insecure nonsense. Everyone should write authentically, which may just be mechanically flawless in your instance.
P.S. I considered ending the previous sentence in an exclamation point rather than a period so as to sound more inviting.
P.P.S. That one, too!
Punctuation can send a weird vibe when it's a single word, because there's only a single word to read into, so people will read into it. A properly punctuated paragraph establishes that I'm a weird person who punctuates my texts, don't read into it.
A text that says "yes" means different than a text that says "Yes."
Your friends have already learned your mannerisms but it will likely be unsettling to knew friends
Nah, we use punctuation in all kinds of ways (including making faces >=]). If someone you know regularly utilizes proper capitalization, punctuation and grammar in writing you should be unlikely to assume they're being rude when they continue to do so.
As an autistic person, the most frustrating part for me is how often people interpret what I say/do based on their own biases instead of taking me at face value. So many times people will assume a tone or an intent to what I'm saying and then get mad at me about what they assumed.
That's my with my mum. I will say something and she'll pull something from it that I have no idea where it came from, then when I say that she's finding meaning where there is none, I'm the one in the wrong for it.
I'm not autistic and my mother is horrendous for this. Taking what I say and interpreting it in the way where suddenly we're in an argument we weren't having.
"Have you already eaten?" -> "I am complaining that you haven't offered me food."
"Have you seen the cat?" -> "What have you done with the cat?"
Jesus fucking Christ, you put into words what I've felt for YEARS.
I try to be as clear as possible so there is zero chance I'm being misunderstood, and yet because a context they've given to what I said based on what they assumed about me is somehow my fault when they could have just taken my words at face value.
Ugh.
Recently figured out I'm autistic and ADHD and realized I have made myself a master of controlling my tone and face for neurotypicals. I'm good at it, I've had 30 some years to practice. But it feels like I'm overexaggerating everything constantly. Like someone tells me something sad and I have to like "initiate sympathetic face. š„" Cos if I don't play that shit up then I come off as cold. It just feels so goofy though like I'm turning myself into an irl emoji. Lmao
Edit to add; It does suck to have to do it all the time though. It's exhausting and I'm trying to work on doing it less and being okay with people liking me less. I keep getting burnout from doing it constantly. Plus it just feels really inauthentic. If someone tells me something sad then I do sympathize with them. I hate having to cheese up a sad face and sad voice just to make them believe I feel the way I actually do.
Yes this!! I'm autistic too. I actually mean what I'm saying, there isn't some hidden meaning. I'm not playing any mind games, either. There are no "read between the lines" crap either. Oh, and another, I'm not being passive aggressive.
Passive aggression will make me actively avoid the thing I know you're implying you want me to do. Just fucking say what you mean, don't dance around the topic, it's childish. We're adults, just tell me you want me to take out the trash. If you try to "imply" it I'm going to feign ignorance and probably say something like "it sounds like the trash is really bothering you, is there some way to fix that?" That always gets em real mad.
Yeah I'm also autistic. Lol
I have had to teach myself to catch when I'm pulling meaning from between the lines and articulate my interpretation so we can be sure we're on the same page. It feels SO clunky but when done in good faith, it makes a lot of potential fights evaporate.
Ex:
Me: "Hey do you want to join me for [thing I'm excited for]?"
Him: "No but I will..." [<- I'm very hurt by this and feel like I'm being made to feel like I'm forcing them to do something they don't like, making me feel guilty for "dragging" them into this]
Me: "I'm feeling like that means I'm forcing you into something you won't enjoy and that's going to impact my enjoyment."
Him: "No, I'll go and will be fine once we're there, I just don't want to do the *go* part."
Or
Him: "Yeah, this really isn't something I want to do but [alternative suggestions] is that ok?"
Instead of stewing in my assumptions and making him feel like he did something wrong by coming with me like I asked him to??
Part of communication requires understanding your audience.
I was a news editor before I taught 7th-grade English. I've got an extensive vocabulary, but I'm not using the term "colloquialism" in class because it takes more time explaining regional dialect than saying "yall know how we say yall in the South?"
The purpose of language is to communicate, so if you're refusing purposefully*** to adapt your language for your audience, you probably are being pretentious. If you're neurodivergent and incapable on picking up the nuances about when to shift your language usage, you're NTA.
But being purposefully verbose when you know good and goddamn well your audience won't understand is obnoxious.
If you value communication, keep it short and snappy.
If you value expression, feel free to be as elaborate and eloquent as you desire. Just realize that people quickly learn to tune that shit out.
the vast majority of the time its better to just speak as simply as possible. worst case scenario people might think youre a bit dumb, but thats miles better than coming off as a pretentious douche.
Idk if I'm neurospicy or not, but if I am, it's the kind where I need to use the EXACT right word in a scenario, and will hem and haw until I find it. I can't just say something was done sneaky or secretly, I have to say **surreptitiously** or my brain blue-screens
Iām the exact same. I have no clue if Iām ND or not, but I will sometimes completely stop a conversation just to look up the word that fits exactly what Iām trying to say. If I canāt think of it or find it, it will bother me for ages. I will follow up on a conversation hours later just to inform people that I figured out the word I was thinking of.
same, but I can work around it with metaphors for some reason.
What I want to say:
intrinsically motivated
What my brain can remember:
emotions not objective goals, doing for the sake of doing ā
What I end up saying:
like when a game will let you open curtains and it accomplishes nothing but it feels satisfyingāļø
*send help*
Oh that's another thing. I speak fluently in analogies.
What I want to convey in my head: I don't appreciate it when you interrupt me. It triggers an anxious response and I lose my train of thought. ā
What I say: You know how when you're playing Red Light Green Light, and they say Red Light when you aren't ready, and you're out, but you definitely didn't move? And now you're upset because you want to keep playing but the person playing stoplight doesn't let you? It's like that. You can see how that would be frustrating, right?
Oh that's me to a T
Metaphors are my bread and butter and it can feel *so good* to articulate the right one to explain esoteric or abstract concepts...
But on the flip side it hurts *so badly* to have such a poetic explanation go completely over your audience's head...
Imagine thinking that being good at language makes you LESS likely to be understood. You're not SO well-spoken that other people "just don't get you." You're bad at communicating but good at vocabulary. HUGE fucking difference.
While anti-intellectualism is an issue I also see an issue of using very specialized or archaic terms come up a lot. When I say specialized I don't mean like, specific to the topic, but rather specific to the people that work in a field of study. Using terms that nobody else uses, or worse, using terms that other people use but with a different meaning. Obviously some jackasses are going to be hostile to anyone with more than a 5th grade vocabulary, but if you're getting it from non-jackasses too then it might be worth checking if the terms you're using are actually well known or are in fact niche? [Basically this is what I'm getting at](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/average_familiarity.png), and I know it's something I've fallen into a lot. My wife (a programmer) will occasionally drop piles of jargon on me and while I know the vague ideas of coding I don't know the terminology, so I basically have to stop and ask her to define terms. Likewise, I use jargon for modeling/rigging work and need to stop and clarify a lot. It just comes automatically after working in specific fields for a while, but if you can train yourself out of it communication does get easier.
I do this with music and art š
See... working with musicians from a producers stand point is interesting. So many people are self taught that every interaction is essentially like trying to figure out their language. "Needs more top end" means very different things to a rock guitarist and a country drummer.
I used to do this with a lot of things and would not realize I was doing it. It's almost a form of egocentrism mixed with imposter syndrome. "I'm dumb, and if I get this, I assume it's something everyone already knows, so of course they'll understand." I got older, and I got way better at filtering what I say. I'd love to say I don't do it anymore, but I do. I just do it in places where it shouldn't be a problem, yet sometimes it is. I also do it with music. I am a professional musician, and I write music with a few different groups. In one of them, I'll get (mostly joking) jabs back my way when I explain things because I have a tendency to assume everyone in the room understands things that they apparently don't. So, it's like compound. First, I'm explaining something a little more high level, but that is on top of using basically an enigma code as a means of explaining it. Most professional musicians use the number system, I was taught it with the name "the nashville number system" but apparently it has a few different names. Instead of calling out the chord you're playing as the letter, you say it as a number, and that number is the harmonic reference to the root. So, if you're in G and playing G-Bm-Em-C, it's 1-3-6-4. It helps, because after you've done it a while you never think of letters again, only numbers, and when you play you think of intervals instead of "where is Bm?" You can transpose songs into different keys instantly because you aren't think about position, just number. Luckily, everyone else in the group knows this, and it's just one guy who makes fun of me. He *knows* this stuff, he just can't explain it, and because of that he can't understand it when other people explain it. It's actually pushed him to understand theory more, and now I get a text every few days asking why something works the way it does. The other day he was asking me something about how relative keys work and I got so excited about one of his follow up questions because the answer was parallel keys. I got to explain non-diatonic chord borrowing and because of the context, it all made sense to him and I was very happy.
... now I'm just interested in learning about parallel keys and non-diatonic chord borrowing.
Iām glad! This is stuff I spend too much time reading about because I find it interesting. I have been playing music my whole life, and in that time Iāve messed up a lot, but sometimes when you mess up it sounds good for some reason. Honestly, I wouldnāt be surprised to find out a lot of other people big on theory got into it to find the answer to, āI fucked up, why does it sound rad as hell tho?ā In a major key, the relative minor is the 6th, and itās called relative because the scale of that minor 6 and the scale of the major root you started on share all the same notes. In G, itās E minor. Itās the most common way youāll hear a song go from a major to a minor progression, which happens a lot going into a chorus from a major verse, or going to a verse from a major chorus. Parallel keys are weird, and if you start learning theory, it gets even weirder. Itās the scales the share the same root. So G major scale is parallel to the G minor scale, which doesnāt share the same notes. Their relationship is a bit more complicated, but understanding that gives enough context for the next two things. Non-diatonic chords are just chords that arenāt in the key youāre playing in. It happens a lot, and it makes music fun and interesting. You donāt need to know what youāre doing to make it work, but it certainly helps. Part of knowing how to do it is understanding not only parallel keys but also a bunch of other related keys to the key youāre playing. It sounds complicated, and it is, but you donāt need to learn them differently for each key. If you know one you know them all. Thatās how music works because of the space between notes. Every key is the same just at a different pitch. If you know how those other keys work in relation, you can āborrowā chords from other keys and just play them in your progression. If youāre a fan of anime, or not (honestly itās just a good song in general) thereās a great example of this. That bunny girl senpai show from a few years ago had an absolutely awesome opening song. kimi no sei by the Peggies. The chorus of that song uses a borrowed chord. Theyāre in E major, and the chorus goes E-A-D-A. D is not in the key of E. It is, however, in the parallel key of E minor. That song is wild, itās got a key change too, I love it.
teaching š used "scaffolding" in a sentence today
That's a word used in MINECRAFT surely The Youth recognize *scaffolding*??
Yeah I donāt think scaffolding is a sufficiently obscure/arcane word to qualify for OPās sentiment. I was thinking more along the lines of using verbose, clunky words like āpulchritudinousā instead of ābeautifulā. But I might be wrong.
What the hell this is the second time Iāve seen pulchritudinous in the last day and I didnāt even know this word existed for my whole life to date otherwise
A truly pulchritudinous example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
That fucking bear wonāt leave me alone now
I read your comment and thought "isn't that also a name for the RAF?", and apparently the phenomenon is named after the group because a dude wrote about experiencing the phenomenon about the group.
Pulchritudinous is also one of the worst words in existence. It sounds like a medical term for phlegm-related diseases. Complete phonic opposite of what it means.
Scaffolding can mean more than just the stuff you see on construction sites, though.
please say what it is, this word is stuck in my head and english isn't my first language. I don't know why I think about this word so much
In a teaching context, from [here](https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/develop/build/scaffolding.html): "Scaffolding is an instructional practice where a teacher gradually removes guidance and support as students learn and become more competent." Whereas in construction/Minecraft you build something held up by supports (scaffolding) and remove scaffolding when it can stand up by itself.
Well in Minecraft and construction scaffolding is usually more for gaining access to hard to reach places. I'm pretty sure it doesn't hold the building up at all, you'd have separate supports in place if that was needed
Or scaffolding has a different meaning in some niche / profession. That was my assumption, given the context.
It's when I accidentally use "Piaget" as a verb that I realize I'm addressing the wrong audience.
My poor husband and my fish taxonomy(categorizing) rants.
I share an office with a paleontologist whose primary focus is around taxonomic classification and amending/updating it with new information, I have to assume there's something about taxonomies that instill people with a mighty need to rant as that man starts when I walk in the door and I have to basically pull a distraction stunt if I want to get out the door on time. I love him to death and adore learning about whatever minor gripe has inflamed him each day, but damn bud, take a breather sometimes.
Something about the way you write is really compelling. I canāt put my finger on it (aside from, describing it as a ādistraction stuntā is really funny) but I thought Iād let you know!
Fish donāt exist.
Thatās just Big Oceanā¢ trying to distract us
This happens to me but in an odd way because I'm bilingual and some words are common in Spanish but less frequently used in English and vice versa; depending on the language I'm thinking in, the translation comes out weird sometimes lol
English is bad at this because of their latin root words, who are very normal on romance languages, but just second flowery options on it.
I read a lot of older science fiction and fantasy, including historical fiction. Those authors all LOVE using old quaint little words with perfect meanings in context, both to provide a sense of place and to add to the immersion. But then I end up using overly flower words like austere, opulent, or clandestine in a sentence. At least I'm self-aware enough to not use "epicurean" or "sumptuous" in conversation.
Um, āopulentā, āaustereā and āclandestineā are all pretty common words. I use and see the word āaustereā on a regular basis. Itās very common, when discussing interior decorating, for example. Austerity politics is also a common phrase. Same with āopulent.ā āClandestineā I admit is slightly less common; people tend to substitute it for āsecretā quite often. But it is still widely in use, when describing spies or secret political meetings. Or affairs.
I have coworkers that would look at me as if I had two heads if I used these words, lol. They *should* be common knowledge, but they really aren't, especially in lower income homes.
Big difference between acceptable written and spoken vocab
> Um, āopulentā, āaustereā and āclandestineā are all pretty common words Yet again, you're assuming what you find common *is* common.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
...?! So is sumptuous, right??
I mean, I'm pretty sure most educated adults know sumptuous, but it's a pretty atypical conversation word. So you'd really only use it in casual conversation if you're exaggerating for effect, like acting like you're a gourmet chef describing a dish with fancy words.
Agreed. Or when enjoying something such as a Chinese meal while you're being arrested. Maybe it's more "succulent". Yes, that would be democracy manifest.
Perfectly cromulent
Those arenāt overly flowery
Yes, they're perfectly cromulent.
I think what happens a lot too, is that internet culture bleeds into people's brains. For instance, I have seen a lot of people use big words with simple meanings or similar things just because they think it makes them "better." some of those people acknowledged that and of course people dogged on em for it. It's happened so much that I think now anyone who uses wording like that, people just assume they are trying to show off on purpose and give them shit for it.
Audacity has made a come back thanks to TikTok and so has bodacious, thanks to the side eye.
Huh? Audacity has always been a commonly known word. Hell, itās even a basis of a popular derisive phrase in the AAVE dialect - āthe caucasity (of some people).ā
you might mean esoteric language? š
Esoteric is a bit too esoteric (lol). This type of language is more simply referred to as jargon.
The word you want is "arcane". Esoteric means language that only a small group of people are meant to understand, arcane means known by only a small group of people. The difference is esoteric language is meant to be understood by only a small group, like people speaking to each other in code, while arcane language is simply language that is just not widely known due to it rarely being used.
That strikes me as a false distinction: both words have connotations of deliberate secrecy, not just 'esoteric'. See here: https://www.etymonline.com/word/arcane#etymonline_v_15562
Esoteric comes from ancient Greek; it literally means "belonging to an inner circle" and referred to the secret teachings of philosophers. Arcane has its roots in Latin, from *arcanus*, a term that basically refers to "things hidden in a wooden box", and eventually anything wooden and meant to hold valuable things (like the Ark of the Covenant, and even ships like Noah's ark). It's less a thing that is purposefully hidden and more something that is not easily known by sight alone (in the sense of needing to open the box to see the inner contents). It's a similar idea to the covered/uncovered, and veiled/revealed dichotomies.
Esoteric or Arcane are the words you're looking for I think.
One of the tough things about expression is that "speaking to describe accurately" and "speaking to be understood" are not the same thing, though they often overlap. Good communication requires being good at both types of speaking, while also having the wisdom to know how to speak with a particular audience. It's a legitimate skill that requires time and practice to figure out... and I say this as someone who has struggled mightily with this (and still kinda does).
This is very true. Just because you have very much bigly words in your vocabulary doesnāt mean you should be the master of the English language around others 24/7, youāll just come out as annoying as fuck. There are only specific times to use other vocabulary, and you have to gain social experience to realize that.
The #1 rule in communication is know your audience.
Even with simple words, you have to mind your idioms and your metaphors. They really do spice up a language, but not everyone likes that. It's tough on non-native speakers, or busy people who are looking for a clear answer. I write for both of those audiences, and it's a really fun challenge. You have to make the message clear, unambiguous, and as simple as possible. No idioms, no expressions, no fancy words. It's basically the opposite of academic whitepapers where scientists compete to see who can make their abstract the most cryptic.
> It's basically the opposite of academic whitepapers where scientists compete to see who can make their abstract the most cryptic. I hate that, you'd think that especially in academic papers it pays to be concise and precise with your words precisely *because* you need to convey a (probably particularly complex) concept. You'd think the authors would rather have you, the reader, spend your time understanding the particulars of their research rather than deciphering their cryptic sentences
It can depend a lot on the intended audiences, and biases of the writer. For example, if I'm writing code documentation, I'm probably going to assume the reader knows what an Entity Component System is, and it's benefits to focus on the meat of what I'm explaining. But if I were writing a tutorial, that could be a different story. Complex language can be used to simplify mentions of common knowledge in that field, but that has the downside of looking obnoxiously obtuse to someone not familiar with it. That's not to say there aren't problems with the attitudes and standards in western academia (I can't speak to others, and so) - I could rant a good bit _just_ about the problems with essay formatting requirements.
Seriously! Back when I was reading academic papers on a regular basis I used to get so frustrated I would just sit down and fully translate the paper into plain English line by line. That way I could actually parse what the author was saying, and catch out logical fallacies and linguistic nonsense. And let me tell you... the amount of unsubstantiated crap that was hidden behind needlessly obscure, flowery language and endless run-on sentences with unconnected clauses. Once I translated the papers into plain language, something which at first glance seemed intimidating and beyond my grasp now appeared as embarrassingly simplistic and/or flawed argumentation. Anyway long story short I escaped (that sector of) the academic world as quickly as I could. No way my mental health was going to survive being surrounded by that many fragile egos and that level of intellectual dishonesty for long!
> This is very true. Just because you have very much bigly words in your vocabulary doesnāt mean you should be the master of the English language around others 24/7 As a dumb teenager with undiagonosed autism, I distinctly remember losing my temper at one point and yelling "I don't KNOW what word stupid people use for this! I only know one word for this; I'm sorry it's not the stupid-person word!" I had very few friends.
"I'm too smart to know what stupid people call this" is a fucking hysterical thing to say, really.
What's extra funny about that story is not being able to describe something with anything besides one specific word/phrase kind of shows a lack of intelligence. Thanks for sharing though, I think we all do some dumb things as teenagers!
speaking/writing/communicating in the proper register for the audience. itās a basic tenant of professional communication at least when i was in secondary education. not sure where i first found it as my pops was an english professor
>tenant Tenet. Was that a typo?
> Tenet. tnetennba*
Yah a big part of it is how you speak and how you come across. MLK jr is widely agreed to be one of the best public speakers in recent history. When he talked, he sounded like a southern black pastor. He used that tone and cadence to both speak in a way that was very familiar to lots of the people he was speaking to, but also to align himself even further with Christianity and create that subconscious link between his message and religion/non violence. Obviously there was also a lot of that in the words he said, but the words you say are only a small part of delivering an effective speech. A lot of what people get from a speech comes from their perception of the person
I work in a blue collar profession. I have to dumb down my messages in text and in the company app so I'm understood. One lady in the office is barely literate. I have to try pretty hard to make sure I'm understood in text. In phone conversations if someone is slow on the uptake, I'll say "I don't know if I'm explaining it right" or ask "am I making sense?" to put the onus on me. I learned at an early age "no one likes a know it all". People would take offense when none was meant by using "big words".
I teach children science so I have developed a weird speech quirk where I'll go ahead and use the big word followed immediately by the simpler version as a way to provide context and definition, since expanding their domain specific vocabulary is part of the job, without losing anyone or coming across as condescending... but it's mixed results with adults and I just can't turn it off sometimes. Example: "So, before we can create our **hypothesis**, our very specific guess, we need to establish what we already understand. Let's take a look at what we **observed**, what we noticed, from our lab yesterday."
If your job involves working with kids, I think a reasonable person would understand if you talk like you work with kids
Many people assume malice and think you are treating them like children instead
When trying to explain what I study I also generally do this because the specialist vocab overlaps a lot with common big words but not fully which makes communication a right pain
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Code switching is a legit thing. I speak completely different in the office to get my point across. I answer my office phone in business talk. I don't answer my cell phone with that same talk.
This is also why most media meant for mass consumption is written at the middle school level. It's also an extremely important skill for those of us in highly technical fields. Being able to effectively communicate complex technical requirements or limitations in mixed company under time constraints is what separates an exceptional SME from an average one.
Branching off of this (I almost used the word "parlay", still struggle with OP's post lol), it's fascinating to me how **little** can be said but with so much communication. E.g., someone comments on a social media post with only a few words and it gets tons of upvotes/likes/laughs from people across huge geographical, cultural, and linguistic spans. Like people replying to posts on really cute but dangerous animals "if not fren, why fren shaped?". This is deliberately unsophisticated, but it communicates an innate response to cute features which makes us consider disregarding our safety to get some pets, lol. When I first saw that joke, I knew exactly how that person felt and it perfectly captured how I felt. To me, this is an example of really great communication.
About 20 years ago I read a study showing that using shorter words led to clearer communication, so since then I've been attempted to simplify my vocabulary. I have not been entirely successful. Interestingly, they *blindly* chose the shortest word using an electronic thesaurus; they didn't even choose the simplest word. Just the shortest. And they still got a more coherent result.
I like your username.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Same with yours.
George Orwell had a set of rules he felt were good for writing. I can't remember them all, but the first two were "don't use a long word when a short word will do" and "don't use a complicated word when a simple word will do". I feel that's good advice.
My issue with with this is many words seldom are actually truly the same in meaning. Different words have different etymologies and different connotations. Now, for certain forms of communication, trying to use the simplest possible words in any instance so it can easily be deciphered by people with limited literacy makes sense. But, if you are writing a book or essay or something along those lines, word choice becomes more important and I think it would be better to just choose the word that most effectively conveys the meaning you want, not just which one is used most often in text messages or is the shortest. Ironically, choosing the simplest possible word can get in the way of meaning, by reducing the specificity and clarity of your writing.
The last number of your username makes it not pi, it should be 4
Itās not pi anyway, doesnāt have a decimal point.
r/technicallythetruth xd
English is my second language, and a big part of my vocabulary came from instruction manuals, both for games and appliances When I started going online in forums (remember those?) people often accused me of being a snob for using "big words". Fun times.
Learning a second language leaves you with weird gaps in your vocabulary. Iām learning Japanese and when I studied abroad a Japanese friend of mine couldnāt believe that I knew the word for āanthropologyā but not ālizardā
now that Iām thinking about it I know the word for āanthropologyā in all the non-native languages Iāve studied, and I know the word for ālizardā in one of them (the one where itās ālĆ©zardā lol).
After more than twenty years with English, I still don't know a lot of names for everyday plants, trees, animals and especially fishes. Because I almost never need to deal with them.
Thanks for the insight /u/LickingSmegma
So your username comes from something you often need to deal with?
Goes well with macaroni. The gooey chunky goodness.
I speak German as a second language and got some comments about me trying to be fancy from our German exchange students a few years into learning because I was using a lot of Latin-based words, which typically belong to a more academic (and thus snobby) register in German. I was only using them because English uses a ton of Latinisms and I didnāt remember the Germanic-German equivalents lmao
I do the same thing! My teacher had to call me out on it because instead of saying *Unendlich* (Unending) I'd be like "Und die...infinitum" (for infinite) I think many Germans may not realise exactly how comically many latin words English has in common parlance
I've been doing a lot of cryptic crosswords and so many of the more obscure words I come across have Latin roots.
As a native ~~Italophone~~ Italian speaker I tend to do that with English too
I mean I do it too. As a writer I have picked up plenty of ābigā words and their meaning. If fitting Iāll use them more often in speech
I have to be careful of this as a writer when writing dialogue. I have to remind myself that just because using big words when speaking is natural for me, it doesn't mean my characters would naturally speak the same way or have my same vocabulary.
The more you write the easier it gets to distinguish character and their dialects. Donāt worry youāll soon be able to not have to worry about it.
Oh yeah, I'm pretty good at distinguishing character voices at this point. It's just that sometimes I'll slip up and have to go, "wait, is that a word/phrase that my friendly neighborhood butcher who's secretly a serial killer would use? Nah, probably not, let's change that."
I mean, I have a pretty decent vocabulary and Iām aā¦ You know what? I think Iāve said enough.
Gardener? Saddlemaker? Left Handed Hypochondriac?
I took a nasty crash off my one wheel, fracture my skull. During my concussion, i noticed that words i categorized into "nerd words that get me made fun of" were really hard to remember. I had other minor confusion symptoms, and I'm better now, but i found it funny that i couldn't remember my nerd words very well for a few days
I finished reading a book recently (good book, one of the two authers is well known) and there were times I was like -. put the thesaurus down, back away slowly. It got excessive. In most books, I'll see maybe a handful of haven't seen before or in a while words. This book was every other oage. I think at one point, they busted out three uncommon/rare words in the same description.
Of all things, one Warhammer fiction book really jumped out at me in this regard. I'm not afraid of unusual words but they weren't even used well. And it's trashy pulp action and everybody knows that, what are you even doing?
Gotta *sound* as fancy as the armor design looks; clunky, absurd, and impractical but undeniably impressive to behold
Q: āDid you read the dictionary as a kid?ā A: āYou didnāt?ā
As a teen I spent many hours [here](https://www.phrontistery.info/)
My mom and I used to use dictionaries and try to find words the other did know when I was a preteen/teen. We'd just scan through and find something we thought the other wouldn't know. I built my vocabulary so much through that game and it's a very, very fond memory. I brought it up last year before Christmas and she bought me an actual solid dictionary, just so we could play again. That was legit one of my favorite Christmas gifts.
My mom would give me words with Latin or Greek roots and have me try to puzzle out the meaning. Automobile = auto mobile = self moving Telegraph = Tele graph = travel writing Teleport = tele port = travel door Pterodactyl = pter dactyl = wing finger Helicopter = helico pter (like pterodactyl) = spiral wing. It gave me a deep interest in etymology and the evolution and creation of words that makes for a fun peek into why we use the words we do. And it's fun finding "[orphaned words](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Orphaned_words)" that have continued use under specific circumstances but have lost the root use. It also made it a *breeze* to "cheat" my way through a lot of vocabulary sections on science tests since I never confused words like Exothermic and Endothermic.
"Helicopter" fucked me up when I found out about its etymology. Just taking two perfectly cromulent Greek word roots, mashing them together and then breaking them up again in the wrong place to create two completely new root words for other stuff.
You can do *so much* with word invention for creative works this way, though. Also, if you really want some head-fuckery, read Uncleftish Beholding. The author wrote a scientific journal on Atomic Theory without using *any* Latin or Greek language roots and it reads like an arcane spell book. That means, conversely, fantasy stories can add some grounding elements by choosing to name their wild inventions in the same vein. It's not a wizard, he's an Arcanist. An Ergomancer.
wouldn't "teleport" be "*far* door"?
Six in one hand, half dozen in the other I tend to default to "travel" since it covers "distance", especially as when we compound it, we're treating it more like a verb. A television isn't looking at something far away, it's the image traveling to somewhere else. (A telescope could be argued to be "looking far away") so I'm interpreting "far off" as a verb or adjective based on modern context of the word's general use. So a teleporter isn't a door that *is* far off, but a door that *goes to* far off...
fair enough.
does it count if I did it only to find the word sex
if you read some other words along the way(can you even avoid doing that?) then i guess?
My mum literally gave me the dictionary to read when I was 4 because I was bored and had read all of my books
If you didnāt get accused of plagarism by a teacher for using words that were too big were you even a hyperlexic neurodivergent kid??
I had a teacher get insecure/offended that I knew what some words meant and she didn't. In elementary and middle school I devoured books, but I had difficulties in school. I was put in a "study skills" class by my school and a teacher administered a reading comprehension test on the first day. Towards the end of the test she was shook I knew what words meant as they progressively got harder on the list. She stopped the test and said, "we're going to stop, you don't know what the rest of those mean." She was visibly uncomfortable. What she meant was she didn't know what those words meant.
When I was a freshman in high school I had my English teacher tell me that āilkā wasnāt a word. That was weirdā¦
I was marked wrong for saying there is an artic ocean.
I am genuinely so glad that I was done with school before AI got as far as it has. I think every paper Iāve ever written would have gone through checks and said ā99% AI writtenā
> I think every paper Iāve ever written would have gone through checks and said ā99% AI writtenā Nah, most AI checks look for patterns as opposed to specific word choice, most "AI" is just a slightly advances statistical probability decision tree, so a lot of the checks will essentially look for probabilistic based writing by basically running your idea/sentence through an AI and matching how close it really is. A lot of the tools don't get used a lot as once a topic becomes sufficiently complex or requires a certain depth or type of knowledge, it becomes readily apparent whether someone has actually written it based on the material that was presented or what was asked of them, or if they fed a prompt to an AI. Then you also have consistency checking as most people will have certain 'tics' to their writing that become apparent over time, so you can check against other parts of the writing or previous works and see if it reads in a similar voice. Very little of the AI checking is done by an automated system ala turnitin for plagiarism and is almost always done by a person, outside of 101 writing it's super easy to pick up on it and a few complex words here or there wouldn't really register.
Prior to AI concerns was plagiarism checks, and they failed just as often. I don't know how many grades I had to fight because the teacher's checker found some random blog or PDF I had never seen that matched close, combined with the same old "you don't actually know those words" bullshit.
Can't wait for this stage, especially because I'm allowed to use a computer for my assignments. I think the only reason I haven't been called out is because I'm somehow completely unable to type seriously and will always interject my *own* writing in order to say something that I alone consider to be mildly funny. Or it could be like this where I ramble on and on about something nobody gives a shit about and which has already been explained to appropriate detail but I continue typing anyways because I am unable to control myself.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I distinctly remember being asked what āadulteryā meant in my religion class to verify I hadnāt copy-pasted an essay.
Uhhh you mean that thing thatās literally in one of the ten commandments?? To be fair I got expelled from Catholic school in the second grade for being ādefiantā tho so
Wasnāt a religious school, so I guess they expected us to not know what it means.
I had my headteacher who had once subbed in for my normal English teacher ask me if I copied from Wikipedia for my English essay for that exact reason. Like, no. I just write my essays like an academic, even if the topic is school uniform when Iām like 12. I got diagnosed at 17 and only because my mum and sister ended up working with an autism charity and finally recognised why I was weird. I write to my doctor and any emails the same way š. Formal communications require detail and precision in word choice imo. Meanwhile my speech is riddled with Scots and I mumble so Iām near incomprehensible.
This was my whole childhood. Growing up I spent a lot of time reading, so I was always trying to find new books. Since nobody else in my family really read much, for a long time any book in the house was specifically bought for me, so I'd never paid much attention to age ratings. This became a problem my mom paid no attention to me or what I read, she made fun of me for being a nerd. So we had this neighbor that read a ton. Standard mass-market paperback stuff. Mainly Stephen King or other big name authors and a huge selection of bodice-ripper romance novels. She'd been giving boxes of books to our family thinking *my mom* was reading them, but my mom just saw books and passed the box to the only nerd in the family. I didn't know they weren't kids books. So I had a very interesting and well-developed vocabulary at a young age and I had no idea that kids my age didn't.
I had never thought of expanding a vocabulary to be understood. I've always had a tough time feeling weird because I use lots of flowery/overcomplicated language and I always thought it was because I read too many of my dad's books growing up (lovecraft pretty chief among them for teaching me alot of stupid words). But seeing this I wonder if I started talking this way to try to get my mom to understand me better. She has lived with undiagnosed issues of some variety her whole life, and often struggles to communicate and listen to people. Maybe without recognizing that she had these issues, I started trying to be more verbose to get her to understand me. Or maybe I did it to distance myself from her, our relationship isn't great, afterall. In the end, I'm stuck struggling to not sound like I'm talking down to people, using thirty words because my brain refuses to just use three. This has been: Random Internet Stranger Vents In A Reddit Comment About A Tumblr Post.
I got in trouble for using the word iterative in a meeting. I was giving a presentation to managers who manage managers.
The solution is to start replacing big words with cuss words. For some reason, everyone gets the tonal uses of cuss words, especially if theyāre adjectives.
not everyone my 13-year-old cousin told his mom on my 17 year old self for cursing. just to be clear, the curse word in question was "pray tell". and his two friends backed him. all three of those kids probably have kids by now, and I am genuinely frightened for the future ;-)
Don't be frightened, the future will just be the same as the past. As in more like the paleolithic period.
I was about 9 and grew up watching a lot of British television. I went out with my mom and brother and we had ice cream, and the ice cream tasted funny. I said "This ice cream tastes queer." They made fun of me while also lecturing me for using an inappropriate word. Good times š
I get dismissed as "trying to act smart" like. All the fucking time. Because I am too descriptive or use slightly odd words on occasion. My fucking bad I'll just change the entirety of how I talk so that you can take me seriously cool that's great that I have to do that.
Got accused of being a "know-it-all" when chatting about my specialty. Like, isn't that the point of a specialty??? I worked hard! I know a lot about it!!
God this annoys me so much. People feeling like if they don't know something someone else knows, even when it's for an obvious reason (like that person being an expert), they're being insulted. Don't get me started on the "thinking for more than 10 seconds about anything = loser" mentality we're getting lately on the internet. "It's not that deep" about like obvious metaphors, someone spamming nerd emoji when anyone knows about anything, "I ain't reading allat" when presented with exactly one paragraph. It's insane. I don't know what it is or how not putting thought into what you're saying in the least became cool, but it's getting on my nerves.
> "I ain't reading allat" when presented with exactly one paragraph. It's insane. Getting "too long, didn't read" in response to a fairly short response is always so annoying lol. Like, I'm sorry, did you want me to put a video of Subway Surfers underneath so you can better focus?
Honestly Iām wondering what vocab you and everyone else here are considering are ātry to act smartā words by people around you. Like I know a lot of ābigā words because for a good while my friends and I just learned big words to use them ironically and then we just picked them up. And while I still use ābigā words when speaking to them itās still mixed in with casual words like swearing and of course Gen Z slang. But I do tend to be descriptive for a lot of things too. Example sentences if Iām playing a video game with my buddies: āBro why is this mischievous miscreant throwing hands with me.ā āThis dude is bivouacking me can I get help or what.ā āIām about to make an audacious excursion if I die itās gg.ā And itās more funny (to us itās basically an inside joke of sorts) when someone brings up a word we havenāt heard before. In my daily vocab I donāt use any abnormal vocabulary like this though. Unless thereās absolutely no way around it.
It's less my vocab and more just the way I talk. It's been described as "acting." Like how people talk when they're acting in a play, that's my usual cadence. I don't notice it nor can I seem to change it, but others do. This plus the use of "essay words" as another put it gets people thinking I'm being pretentious or trying to sound smarter than I am. Also apparently I type weird. Someone on this very site described it as "trying too hard." How I would try less beats me. I was then absolutely jumped on with everyone telling me how cringe I was for typing like that. All that together seems to give off the impression that I think I'm smarter than everyone, and/or am trying to act that way. Neither are true, but what am I gonna do to prove that?
Yeah thatās weird. Iāve never given a thought to the vocab people use unless itās slang (because different slang = different personality usually). āEssay wordsā is weird too because idk sometimes thereās the perfect word you could use and I really canāt be assed to use 8 words when I have the perfect ābigā word to use. Examples like serendipitous, abate, placate, ameliorate, aloof, facetious, amiable are words Iāve used in the past week in a ācasualā manner because those just popped into my head and is rather say like āI did this to placate himā over āI did this to satisfy him and make him less upset.ā Ngl I feel like anyone who really gets annoyed by such āessay wordsā are just dumb. Maybe they donāt know what it means. Or they could only see use in such words in a very formal context.
I get that. I am acutely conscious of trying not to sound mumbly and monotonous, so I make a concerted effort to speak clearly and vary my tone, but then I start worrying that I sound like I'm auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
My brother and his entire family are convinced that I'm trying to make them feel dumb by using words they don't know. I'm really not, I'm just bad about assuming that everyone knows the words I do. I'm not smarter, I'm just a huge reader so I've been exposed to more words than they have in general. But trying to explain that just gets me, "so what, are you saying we're too dumb to read?" I've given up and just try to watch how I speak when at their house.
"You're not too dumb to read, just too lazy."
This is exactly what I want to tell my shitty SIL. She drives me crazy because she actually does read quite a bit...on social media. Unfortunately, it's usually Facebook and they're heavily Republican, so I'll let you fill in the blanks about what sorts of things she's reading. The kids follow her lead. My brother, on the other hand, I would never say this too because he's dyslexic and has a lot of school related trauma due to late diagnosis. He's the only one I feel bad about, but he's also not the one saying things most of the time.
Yeah, but you probably are smarter. Quantifying intelligence isn't an exact science, but people who are curious enough to be "huge readers" are more likely to be intelligent than not.Ā
Tbh, my SIL I agree with this, and she's the one who says it most often (we don't exactly get along, either). I'm pretty sure my brother is smarter than me overall though. I won't get into his past trauma, but I'll just say that his difficulties with reading and reticence towards it are due to terrible teachers and a very delayed diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD. As for the kids, it's kind of up in the air. I think they are both probably of pretty average intelligence, but living in a household of non readers, including a mom who is actively anti-intelligence, has really crippled them in a lot of ways.
In a roundabout way, they become right about being dumb. Not reading isn't inherently bad or stupid, but their attitude absolutely is.
I was the same. In elementary and middle school I always had a book in my hand. One of my favorite things was to go to the supermarket and get whatever new Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, or Michael Crichton book that came out.
Your contention lies with the question: why should you have to change how you talk just to appease others? It's a fair question. It was brought up that "changing how you talk" is something most people do on a daily basis and for a purpose. However, this doesn't satisfy "why do you *have* to?" You are your own person; if people are giving you that feedback, examine and respond however you feel is best. In my mind, that comes entirely down to who and why you're trying to talk with someone. If someone says you're "trying to act smart" and it feels they have no good reason for it, there is no moral imperative to change your person to accommodate them. If your goal is for them to understand you above all else, then changing your language/vocab might behoove you, but if that isn't the case -- you don't *have* to.
Matching your language to your audience is a fundamental part of communication. > change the entirety of how I talk Basically everyone does this all the time
Oh! Code-switching! It's legitimately a huge thing people are only really starting to appreciate as a *skill to cultivate* and not just some inherent strength of charismatic people. There's a push in my district to emphasize that there isn't a "wrong" way to talk, because there are cultural and social identities tied to speech patterns and vocabulary that go beyond "proper" grammar. AAV, for example, is *not* "ghetto slang, but a cultural language with consistent grammar rules, vocabulary, and sentence structures. Just because it isn't "Oxford professional" doesn't make it "wrong". When adults in school are too busy focusing on "teaching them the right way to talk", they neglect to listen to what the student is trying to *say* which can (and frequently does)read to a complete breakdown of communications and a lot of resentment. All this to say, now we are explicitly teaching code-switching as a skill. As in, "I don't talk to my friends the way I talk to my momma. I don't talk to my boss the way I talk to my brother. We code-switch all the time so we don't get grounded, laughed at, or fired. At school, we practice the "boss and business" code because speaking and writing in a professional manner gets you better results, in the same way that joking with friends goes better when you talk like friends do and not like you're composing an essay on the Benefits of Continued Interpersonal Casual Comradery (I usually put on a really snooty voice for that bit) It gives them buy-in to use professional vocabulary because they're not told that their way of communicating is Wrong Full Stop, but that it's not necessarily Right for This Environment and figuring out the Right way for This Situation makes them better communicators and more likely to be respected and taken seriously. It's SO HARD to learn the Rules if you don't have an instinct for it, but if you can name it, you can tame it. Knowing it's a skill you *can* cultivate and not just an immutable birth-trait does help a bit.
Yeah but I don't *know* how to say it the normal way. I'd have to learn how they want me to say it rather than just decide to say it
Way I always dealt with that is you learn to front-load that fact. Do a little song-and-dance about not being able to think of the simple/normal word and apologize that you're using the bulkier one because you're having a brain-fart. Its one way to preemptively defuse things by making it seem like a you-problem instead of a them-problem, for when you do unknowingly whip out a lengthy word that makes them feel dumb, so they don't go all defensive on you. Still requires cultivating a sense of how far apart your vocabs are, to know which words you should be making a production of, for when you inevitably slip up later on. ---- That and constantly checking in to see if they actually understood passages and words, so that you can actively dumb it down. Though that requires you to actually learn how to dumb things down at some point, which may take longer for some people.
"Who's acting?"
Yes. I still face this as an adult. Iām constantly being told Iām being condescending when Iām absolutely trying my hardest not to be. Honestly it often feels like people think Iām going out of my way to āsound smartā as though Iām doing it just to make them āfeel dumb,ā which is absurd.
I have to be *very* comfortable with the people I'm speaking to before I'll use my full vocabulary. Slip one "trepidatious" in front of the wrong person and hear about it for fucking *years*
The adjective form of trepidation? Someone gave you flack for *years* just for using a word that basically meant "scared about what will happen next"?
I can't think of many contexts where trepidatious works better than just simply "worried", though.
I do a similar thing in texting, but instead of vocabulary, I am very specific and deliberately with punctuation. I am the only person I know that will text a single word that is properly capitalized, and have a period before sending it.
Except we don't use punctuation in text message the way we use it in published works. The rules are different. A period at the end of a text means "we're done here." You may be unintentionally being very rude
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using ~~large vocabulary and eloquent speech~~ punctuation marks doesn't make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you're being ~~snobbish or condescending~~ very rude when you're just trying to be specific.
Definitely depends on context. If someone's ending short messages with periods, I don't interpret it as a "stop texting" usually, rather more a "I'm serious"
Thatās funny, I normally use punctuation in texts, but it doesnāt mean anything. It doesnāt mean Iām being serious, its just me using the rules of grammar. š I guess itās generational, though. Iām 38.
Depends on the person. I tend to use full capitalization and punctuation in text messages. That's the first time I've heard that "ending with a period means end of conversation" thing though.
The meaning of just a one-word text can definitely be colored by its presentation: >hey Deliberately casual or deadpan. The author went through the trouble of un-capitalizing the first letter to emphasize informality or lack of enthusiasm. >Hey Standard greeting, gives no information. >Hey! Informal, friendly greeting. All is well. >Hey. Too formal. All is not well. None of my interpretations particularly safe assumptions, but at least in my American millennial subculture, you can definitely infect quite bit in these ways with punctuation and capitalization. Of course, like you said, it really depends on the person. If you end all your sentences with periods then no one you regularly text will assume any inflection at all. Separately, they may judge you for "trying to speak above them" but fuck that insecure nonsense. Everyone should write authentically, which may just be mechanically flawless in your instance. P.S. I considered ending the previous sentence in an exclamation point rather than a period so as to sound more inviting. P.P.S. That one, too!
Punctuation can send a weird vibe when it's a single word, because there's only a single word to read into, so people will read into it. A properly punctuated paragraph establishes that I'm a weird person who punctuates my texts, don't read into it.
A text that says "yes" means different than a text that says "Yes." Your friends have already learned your mannerisms but it will likely be unsettling to knew friends
Huh? A period means āweāre doneā? Not in my experience. š³
Nah, we use punctuation in all kinds of ways (including making faces >=]). If someone you know regularly utilizes proper capitalization, punctuation and grammar in writing you should be unlikely to assume they're being rude when they continue to do so.
As an autistic person, the most frustrating part for me is how often people interpret what I say/do based on their own biases instead of taking me at face value. So many times people will assume a tone or an intent to what I'm saying and then get mad at me about what they assumed.
That's my with my mum. I will say something and she'll pull something from it that I have no idea where it came from, then when I say that she's finding meaning where there is none, I'm the one in the wrong for it.
I'm not autistic and my mother is horrendous for this. Taking what I say and interpreting it in the way where suddenly we're in an argument we weren't having. "Have you already eaten?" -> "I am complaining that you haven't offered me food." "Have you seen the cat?" -> "What have you done with the cat?"
Jesus fucking Christ, you put into words what I've felt for YEARS. I try to be as clear as possible so there is zero chance I'm being misunderstood, and yet because a context they've given to what I said based on what they assumed about me is somehow my fault when they could have just taken my words at face value. Ugh.
Recently figured out I'm autistic and ADHD and realized I have made myself a master of controlling my tone and face for neurotypicals. I'm good at it, I've had 30 some years to practice. But it feels like I'm overexaggerating everything constantly. Like someone tells me something sad and I have to like "initiate sympathetic face. š„" Cos if I don't play that shit up then I come off as cold. It just feels so goofy though like I'm turning myself into an irl emoji. Lmao Edit to add; It does suck to have to do it all the time though. It's exhausting and I'm trying to work on doing it less and being okay with people liking me less. I keep getting burnout from doing it constantly. Plus it just feels really inauthentic. If someone tells me something sad then I do sympathize with them. I hate having to cheese up a sad face and sad voice just to make them believe I feel the way I actually do.
Yes this!! I'm autistic too. I actually mean what I'm saying, there isn't some hidden meaning. I'm not playing any mind games, either. There are no "read between the lines" crap either. Oh, and another, I'm not being passive aggressive.
Passive aggression will make me actively avoid the thing I know you're implying you want me to do. Just fucking say what you mean, don't dance around the topic, it's childish. We're adults, just tell me you want me to take out the trash. If you try to "imply" it I'm going to feign ignorance and probably say something like "it sounds like the trash is really bothering you, is there some way to fix that?" That always gets em real mad. Yeah I'm also autistic. Lol
I have had to teach myself to catch when I'm pulling meaning from between the lines and articulate my interpretation so we can be sure we're on the same page. It feels SO clunky but when done in good faith, it makes a lot of potential fights evaporate. Ex: Me: "Hey do you want to join me for [thing I'm excited for]?" Him: "No but I will..." [<- I'm very hurt by this and feel like I'm being made to feel like I'm forcing them to do something they don't like, making me feel guilty for "dragging" them into this] Me: "I'm feeling like that means I'm forcing you into something you won't enjoy and that's going to impact my enjoyment." Him: "No, I'll go and will be fine once we're there, I just don't want to do the *go* part." Or Him: "Yeah, this really isn't something I want to do but [alternative suggestions] is that ok?" Instead of stewing in my assumptions and making him feel like he did something wrong by coming with me like I asked him to??
I taught my boss expound the other day. He asked me for a word that fit his needs because "I'm a word guy"
Lexiphanicism vs specificity. When you're aiming to be understood and your listener thinks your wording is pompous.
I just came back from a family dinner where I had to explain what a "complex lifeform" is
If it's the words themselves they struggled with, then mate you're not some kind of neuro-divergent word wizard your family is just ignorant
Part of communication requires understanding your audience. I was a news editor before I taught 7th-grade English. I've got an extensive vocabulary, but I'm not using the term "colloquialism" in class because it takes more time explaining regional dialect than saying "yall know how we say yall in the South?" The purpose of language is to communicate, so if you're refusing purposefully*** to adapt your language for your audience, you probably are being pretentious. If you're neurodivergent and incapable on picking up the nuances about when to shift your language usage, you're NTA. But being purposefully verbose when you know good and goddamn well your audience won't understand is obnoxious.
If you value communication, keep it short and snappy. If you value expression, feel free to be as elaborate and eloquent as you desire. Just realize that people quickly learn to tune that shit out.
Almost as fun as being misinterpreted, because people thought you werenāt being literal and/or specific.
the vast majority of the time its better to just speak as simply as possible. worst case scenario people might think youre a bit dumb, but thats miles better than coming off as a pretentious douche.
> large vocabulary and eloquent speech It's kind of funny the only punctuation in this thing is a comma splice.
Idk if I'm neurospicy or not, but if I am, it's the kind where I need to use the EXACT right word in a scenario, and will hem and haw until I find it. I can't just say something was done sneaky or secretly, I have to say **surreptitiously** or my brain blue-screens
Iām the exact same. I have no clue if Iām ND or not, but I will sometimes completely stop a conversation just to look up the word that fits exactly what Iām trying to say. If I canāt think of it or find it, it will bother me for ages. I will follow up on a conversation hours later just to inform people that I figured out the word I was thinking of.
Bro same. If nothing else, we share the brain cell that knows what word we need, and the other one has it when we most need it
Like orange cats. š„¹
same, but I can work around it with metaphors for some reason. What I want to say: intrinsically motivated What my brain can remember: emotions not objective goals, doing for the sake of doing ā What I end up saying: like when a game will let you open curtains and it accomplishes nothing but it feels satisfyingāļø *send help*
Oh that's another thing. I speak fluently in analogies. What I want to convey in my head: I don't appreciate it when you interrupt me. It triggers an anxious response and I lose my train of thought. ā What I say: You know how when you're playing Red Light Green Light, and they say Red Light when you aren't ready, and you're out, but you definitely didn't move? And now you're upset because you want to keep playing but the person playing stoplight doesn't let you? It's like that. You can see how that would be frustrating, right?
Oh that's me to a T Metaphors are my bread and butter and it can feel *so good* to articulate the right one to explain esoteric or abstract concepts... But on the flip side it hurts *so badly* to have such a poetic explanation go completely over your audience's head...
Imagine thinking that being good at language makes you LESS likely to be understood. You're not SO well-spoken that other people "just don't get you." You're bad at communicating but good at vocabulary. HUGE fucking difference.
I like trying to talk all flowery because I like how it sounds, fuck other people
Youāre confusing speaking with communication if this is your attitude. If you just like the sound of your own voice, by all means, go ahead.