Look at you, communicating with a purpose. I’m just trying to make my essay 1500 words
Comment on Aspirations
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months agoYeah, I get shit occasionally in random places for using bigger words when they actually would take multiple sentences to replace.
But there are a fucking lot of people who use big (or obscure) words purely as a kind of signaling that they’re smart, rather than for communication. And it’s usually really obvious to people who have better vocabularies (or better understanding of the jargon in a specific field) that they don’t know what they’re doing.
If after looking up a word, the rationale for the word choice doesn’t become understandable on at least some level, it’s probably nonsense.
audiomodder@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I was absolutely terrible at that. I had really bad homework grades and completion rates exactly because of shit like that.
“You gave me a 500 word question. I can’t make 1500 words out of it. If I’m going to fail anyways fuck turning it in.” (No, no part of that approach was intelligent, but I just couldn’t fill space with obvious trash. My brain would shut down.)
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
On the flip side of this, it makes me sad that using fancy words usually just makes you seem pretentious in normal conversations, which has made a lot of cool/interesting words unusable for me. Even words that used to be pretty common, like insipid, will have most people look at you like 🤨
HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I’ve seen a cool chart somewhere that pointed at specific words for varying intensities of specific adjectives. The objectif was to avoid writing very+adjective, which sounds boring, and use the proper word instead.
Rolando@lemmy.world 4 months ago
“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” - Mark Twain (attributed?)