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[turkishpirate]

Smart Words for Dumbasses Vol. 1it's a great thing when a 50-cent word is just on the verge of common use but still haughty enough to score you points in everyday conversation -- but the key is to pick your damn battles. If you hear someone use anything like "penchant," "egregious," or "obfuscate," smack them for their pedantic* bullshit

Comments

[versonic]

::ahem:: I don't see "salacious" on your list.

[turkishpirate]

that's true. salacious is a good one, but not quite as common or easy to use as these three. there's lots of smart words for dumbasses out there, i'm just starting off easy.

[athlongeek]

It's bizarre for me...I can't stand it when people use 'smart words' when talking, but it's a totally different ballgame when they're in an article/book/internet forum post/etc.

If you walked up to me and said "These days emo is ostensibly ubiquitous", I'd kick you in the face.

I consider there to be 3 'tiers' of words...level 1 (basic words that everyone knows), level 2 (words that 99% of people know, but you can still carry on an intelligent conversation with), and level 3 (words that only vocabulary whores use). The level 3 words almost ALWAYS mean the exact same thing as a level 2 word, and there's no point whatsoever in using them in conversation except to make a point that you're better than someone else. It's different in writing because you're trying to paint a picture with nothing but words, so being more verbose would be preferable...but in conversation it's just unecessary.

(btw, verbose is a level 2 word, IMO)

[turkishpirate]

it's hard to come up with a hard rule to figure out which words a pretentious and which aren't. But ubiquitous and ostensibly and such have more flavor / color to them, so i disagree with your claim that it's all the same.

anyways, from the Vice Guide to Picking Up Chicks:

"It's good to know about four or five 50-cent words you can stuff into a conversation so you sound well read. Don't fuck them up the way black people do, but don't overuse them either. We recommend putting your fancy word next to a swear. Here are some examples: "…so she walks in all precocious like we give a shit," or "…and it's the same old pedantic bullshit he's always going on about," or "She's got this big fucking turgid zit right in the center of her face." When people seem baffled by your big word, pretend you don't understand what they're talking about (you read so much you can't tell the easy words from the hard words)."

some of the examples are bad ['turgid'] but the whole coupling fancy words with dirty words is right on.