Thursday, November 17, 2005

Big words

The following is a post from my LiveJournal I thought worthy of re-posting here:

My friend Crys made an interesting point. Why do some of us (I am a huge offender here) use words that others might not understand?

Is it to make people feel stupid?

Is it to obfuscate the truth?

See how I just offended in the last sentence. Obfuscate is a fancy word meaning to hide or obscure from sight. I can't speak for my fellow offenders but for me these words are in my day to day vernacular (vocabulary) and I use them in normal conversation because for me they most accurately describe what I am thinking. I had girlfriends more than once in high school need dictionaries when reading love letters from me.

Is it a form of intellectual elitism (smart kid thinks he's better than you)? Sadly it might be, although it is often unintentional.

Our usage of words often defines who we are, especially online. When I want to be taken seriously, I up the vocabulary a level. Sadly I often lose people because for me upping the vocabulary a bit throws my writing into the college thesis level.

So for myself and all my fellow intellectual obfuscators, I'm sorry.

Please forgive our verbal flatulence.

5 comments:

JC said...

Your sesquipedalian nature is only slightly overshadowed by your superciliocity and your tendency to meliorize your posts with juvenalian witticism.

Anonymous said...

jc, you're an ass.

Normal people do not speak that way.

why don't you correct MJC's Latin while you're at it, Mr. Snootie-pants?

show off.

Unknown said...

Angel: My SAT didn't have enough big words for me. Maybe MCAT words...

jc: Truly spoken my loquacious and sardonic cohort.

poopoocup: My Latin? Oh, you mean Subsisto, sermo, statum. Literally cease speaking now. I agree my conjugation might be a bit rusty. And for the record, JC is a democrat and the correct word for that is donkey. Ass is politically inexpedient...

JC said...

Poopo cup,
I wasn't going to do this, because my experience has been that nobody gives a damn if your latin is right or not, & I feel a little like a character in the life of brian. But since you asked for it, I feel uniquely qualified to correct MJC's latin since I failed latin 101 at least twice, I think I got a c the third time. (after that I gave up and took spanish)

subsisto sermo statim
I, the speech, stop now.

I wouldnt use surmo (root of sermon) since that seems like more like a speech you'd give. A word that's more like what you want would be...(using latin dictionary from college)... for/fari

Subsisto / subsistere isn't the best word either, I'd probably use pausa / pausae, but there are a lot of ways to say things in latin, in that way it's a lot like english, so instead of picking on your word choices, I think I'll just use what you started with, though it wouldn't have got past the cranky old bat who taught my latin class.

stop the conversation now

should look more like

Subsiste sermonem statim

with that, I will stop the sermon, right now.

Anonymous said...

jc- i knew it. you have crossed the lines of windbaggism and merged into dorkitude.

congrats.