You will be sorry! Grue will return! People are always sorry when Grue returns!

I like fancy. 70 coats of gilt on a sagging lily is just plain moosesh*t and is usually there to try and obscure the fact that you have nothing to say.

Will Self once reviewed a work (if anyone can find the review online, I'd be very grateful) that was supposed to be dark, brooding ...basically emo to the core. And the way he destroyed it was incredible. A true lesson to "deep" and "moody" people everywhere.

He said the problem with that type of writing, when done badly, was the writer was trying too hard to shock and be deep. So he replaced every 'jagged' with "fluffy", every "blood-stain" with "rainbow", every "hate" with "love". And it was as empty as a bodice-ripper romance novel.

Smart man, that Will Self.

dittybopper: bunner: A broad and nimble vocabulary, when used correctly and with an understanding that the point of language is to get to the point - is a great asset and it does further the love of learning, IMHO. There is, however, a very wide and easily identifiable line between writing and speaking well and overwrought priggishness. And the people who cross it do so knowing full well that they're trying to use language as a peacock's plume and these people should be widely ignored.

Here, here.

Generally, I don't like to use "big words" when speaking (or writing, for that matter), because I find the simpler the language, the more elegantly you can express your thoughts. Oral ornamentation for it's own sake is merely verbal masturbation.

Yeah, whatever, dude. But it's "hear, hear", not "here, here".

Baryogenesis: There is a fine line between ornamentation and the effective use of a "big word" that conveys a more complex or precise meaning than its closest "simple" counterpart. Writing should be about the right tool for the right job for the right audience.

Indubitably.

Meh, only "milt" seemed like it was shoehorned into the text. The bigger problem is that Self has no flow. His books and this column never develop a rhythm. Interesting for a writer who wrote about the relationship between music and sex.

Coming on a Bicycle: dittybopper: bunner: A broad and nimble vocabulary, when used correctly and with an understanding that the point of language is to get to the point - is a great asset and it does further the love of learning, IMHO. There is, however, a very wide and easily identifiable line between writing and speaking well and overwrought priggishness. And the people who cross it do so knowing full well that they're trying to use language as a peacock's plume and these people should be widely ignored.

Here, here.

Generally, I don't like to use "big words" when speaking (or writing, for that matter), because I find the simpler the language, the more elegantly you can express your thoughts. Oral ornamentation for it's own sake is merely verbal masturbation.

Yeah, whatever, dude. But it's "hear, hear", not "here, here".

Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety.

Nightsweat: Meh, only "milt" seemed like it was shoehorned into the text. The bigger problem is that Self has no flow. His books and this column never develop a rhythm. Interesting for a writer who wrote about the relationship between music and sex.

There's a lot of people who call themselves writers whose principal toolkit is "Oh, but wait, I digress" because the idea you were trying to express was *obviously* too large to fit into the flow of whatever you were trying to express. And it gets old after about 4 chapters.

A grue in it's natural habitat.

F'rinstance, I'm in a book club on a talker ( yeah, a PG96 talker ) and last month's book was "Juliet, Naked" by Nick Hornby. Now, it's not a terrible book or a bad story, all in all, but I swear I saw more cyclical paragraphs and separating hyphens and ping pong style sentences in the first 30 pages then I've seen in everything else I've read for ages.

He may be able to weave a story but I could NOT manage to give a polly wolly doo dah f*ck about ANY of the characters in that book until chapter 3 and frankly, his style is so stilted, it's difficult to see who is doing what or why.

IMHO, if anybody would aspire to weave a canvas with the written word, first sit thee doon and read every single word that Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote. A book should sit next to you and tell you a story.

Not shout stuff sporadically from the upstairs hall bathroom.

Sunny deserves defenestration for the headline.

*subby

/damn autocorrect

bunner: ping pong style sentences

what the hell is that?

prekrasno: Sunny deserves defenestration for the headline.

But, Sunny is one so true!(*pop*)

bunner: A broad and nimble vocabulary, when used correctly and with an understanding that the point of language is to get to the point - is a great asset and it does further the love of learning, IMHO. There is, however, a very wide and easily identifiable line between writing and speaking well and overwrought priggishness. And the people who cross it do so knowing full well that they're trying to use language as a peacock's plume and these people should be widely ignored.

This is why my husband sometimes refers to me as Diane Chambers.

Cuz he don't know some a dem fancy-type words like I does.

Calling on fark once again to find something almost forgotten. There was a SNL (possibly Friday's) skit about the stock market value of 'five dollar' words. It was probably between 1988-1995

Can anyone come up with a link?

PirateKing: Solipsism seems like a cool philosophy. I wonder why there aren't more of us...

boo
*hiss*

I like looking up words in the dictionary.
Bigger words is better words.

PirateKing: Solipsism seems like a cool philosophy. I wonder why there aren't more of us...

I thought I was the only one...

TheGogmagog: Calling on fark once again to find something almost forgotten. There was a SNL (possibly Friday's) skit about the stock market value of 'five dollar' words. It was probably between 1988-1995

Can anyone come up with a link?

There may be an ad before the clip, sorry about that.

Are you having a stroke?

Only use words long enough to precisely communicate the message you wish to convey. Never longer.

I have a word fetish for obscure "root" words. Where the word modified, often negated, via prefix is common, but the basic root is not.

My cubicle is in a state of unkept disarray. Once I've cleaned it, is it left in a state of "kept array"? Yes.

Yes:
A ruly crowd
A licit affair
Bouts of listful behavior

As an architectural defect in the English language, words keep getting negated with an "in-" or "im-" prefix, which is often minimized into almost nothing in pronounced speech, in fact lots of accents hack off the first syllable, rendering prefixes useless. Thus to avoid confusion the non-negated root gets deprecated in favor of the modified form. Otherwise, a Southern speaker rushing through words would be weirdly unclear on whether they were saying "clement weather", "evitable result" (evitable="capable of being avoided"), vincible (capable of being harmed in some way), or the EXACT OPPOSITE.

There are some negated by suffixes though, generally -less. Listless, reckless, feckless. "Reck" is to have "worry, care, regard". So a cautious person COULD be "reckful", which would be verbally distinct from "reckless" in almost all spoken accents, thus not confused. But is that a word? IT IS NOW!!

Words which appear to be prefixed, but don't have a recognized base word:
iniquity
inhibit
increment/decrement
nonplussed
inept

Plus, instead of doing stupid things like "verbing" non-verbs, there are plenty of words with obscure forms. "carousing" is a recognized word, but not "carouse", "carouser", "caroused"- yet they ARE real words.

Oznog: My cubicle is in a state of unkept disarray. Once I've cleaned it, is it left in a state of "kept array"? Yes.

Yikes, what happened to my "m" key? That's "unkempt disarray" vs "kempt array". LOL Firefox tried to correct me on "kempt". Damn the spellcheck, ramming speed!

Oznog: I have a word fetish for obscure "root" words. Where the word modified, often negated, via prefix is common, but the basic root is not.

You look quite hevelled today.

Etymology is a blast. It is, however, more often than not, not the point of a conversation or a paragraph. Unless the topic is etymology.

wjllope: Oznog: I have a word fetish for obscure "root" words. Where the word modified, often negated, via prefix is common, but the basic root is not.

You look quite hevelled today.

Merriam-Webster says that fails, there's no "hevel". I'll add it to my list though, I keep a list of fails.

LOL Merriam-Webster's "Ask the Editor" feature video sidebar shows that for the 1934 up until the 1947 edition, there was a ghost word "dord" in Merriam-Webster Dictionary which originated from a postcard to the editor which, though a series of highly improbably coincidences, was meant to say " 'D' or 'd' is an abbreviation for 'density' " but was formatted to parse AS an entry request for them in their esoteric formatting requirements, and became "dord means density". Even has a pronunciation penned for it, which does mean it was pulled out of the editor's ass.

dittybopper: I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused such pericombobulation.

It took a couple mental "Wait, what? Back up a sec and re-read that paragraph!" gyrations, but he *does* have a good point. But, as others have said, there IS a point at which an impressive vocabulary and flowery speech become an offensive weapon, and he paraglided over that muthafarkin' point in the first quarter of the article.

Once went to a live performance written by Brass Eye / Blue Jam / The Day Today's Chris Morris, wherein an actor reported that he had once been an exhibit at an art gallery in which he was nude inside a glass case with only his buttocks and anus protruding.....

"Will Self described me as a klepto-masturbatory ovoid...."

/it was ten years ago and that line has remained with me.

HIM: Any minute now, the blowflies will hatch. They've been breeding in a scrap of kidney next to my foot. I cannot bend down or move from side to side in here, and must remain standing with my face pressed to the thick glass. Still, I am lucky. When Susie found me, I had been stranded on a traffic island for four hours. And when she suggested that she take me home and have me walled up as an art installation, I agreed straight away. So here I am, in an alcove in her living room, being exhibited behind glass next to a plaque bearing the name "Berence Oslo." Berence Oslo is the artist that did me. There is a copper tube to help me breathe, and I am naked except for a string vest. Some of my lower parts have been painted yellow. I think the cleaning lady pushed the kidney in through the tube, but it missed my mouth and fell to my feet. Susie is having a sort of dinner to open me officially. It seems to be a great success. Her face is all blotchy with anticipation as she waits for guests to react to me. I am a great hit when one of them taps on the glass and says "Susie, you are a genius. This is what art should be like - moving, an a relevant way." I have instructions to reply to these comments by saying "I am very sorry. This art is crap." Of course the guest is flabberghasted, because they have no idea I can hear them. Only very recent Berence Oslos come fitted with a ticket office intercom. They start raving about the magnificence of a piece of art that is capable of criticising itself. "That's amazing," they say. "This art is capable of criticising itself." As I continue to slag myself off, there is a buzz of expectation as Will Self arrives with his special pillow and a miniature chicken. He spots me, and immediately delivers himself of the opinion that he has never seen a more klepto-masturbatory entropoid. He kneels, and says that now he has glimpsed all our hypocrisies in a neuro-plastic ellipse. There follows a period of silent eating, with occasional sobs, and the passing and gradual filling of a tear thimble.

I've been here for a couple of hours now. Susie summons the guests into an adjoining room. She is an excellent hostess. One girl stays behind, because she is trying to chase the dragon, and it keeps getting away. In the adjoining room there is a hatch, which allows access to my back parts. Susie opens it up, and the guests take it in turns to put their hands through. I gather from their language that they are attempting to read my arse. There's a kind of binary Braille encoded in the relative temperatures of my buttocks. Extra verbs are in the roughness, and adjectives in the formation of folds around my daisy. Presently I can hear squabbling. Apparently my arse has declared that one of them is the slavemaster, but hasn't revealed which one it is. I am beginning to feel ill. There is no-one to notice me except the girl with the foil. She sees that I am in distress, and walks slowly up to me with a very unintelligent look on her face. She empties a lungful of dragon into my tube. My next action is caused by the combination of poppy smoke and the new development taking place next door which some of the guests are calling "Feed the arse." A high-pressure jet of old stomach emerges from my tube, just as Will Self is passing on his way home. "We are all Huxley's babkins," he says, and vaults through a closed window.

The truth is that events continued in pretty much the same way for about a week. I think the girl who had shown herself clumsy with the horse may have died. The blowflies certainly did hatch, and blocked my view completely, so that my abiding memory is of sounds heard through buzzing - mainly the rhythmical slamming of bare skin on alabaster, as Susie succumbed with grunts to the meaty pleasure of each new slavemaster. I was eventually extracted by six men in contamination suits. They were extremely distressed. This happened two days after Susie went on holiday.

K.B.O. Winston: 1. I think you mean 'shevelled' not hevelled.

2. This is a good place to post Stephen Fry's most wonderful monologue on true love of language (as opposed to love of pedantry disguised as love of language)

3. I had a third point. No bloody idea what it was now.

Well it's be "sheveled", because the original word was "disheveled". Single "l".

I thought I'd looked for it earlier... but now I see that Merriam-Webster DOES have an entry for "sheveled" (they put it behind their weak subscriptionwall that kinda looks like there's no entry, but Google found the entry and bypassed their wall).

However, it's only "disheveled" via shortening. Really that might be better classified as a spelling variant for the same word, which took the unusual practice of respelling a word to follow pronunciation. English spellings typically show disregard for pronunciation entirely and doesn't go back and respell the word when pronunciation changes.

K.B.O. Winston: Now I remember:

3. If you like collecting appearances of nearly forgotten words, I read an issue of the comic Unwritten last week that had both whelmed and hest (as opposed to overwhelmed and behest). It's now mentally filed next to the scene from Red Dward where the teacher on the Esperanto video says "I hope when you visit the weather will be clement."

Just throwing that out there. Seemed like a good thread for it.

See that doesn't work "in the wild" with many common pronunciation methods. If you compare natural speech to pronunciation from, say, actors on TV or people making speeches, you'll find some systemic differences. The "in-" prefix often gets blended into a short "n"-sound leading the word. In cases where the previous word ends in a similar sound, like "some", it's unclear whether that was an "in-" prefix or part of the preceding word. "well hey we've got some clement/inclement weather coming up here" in many cases would be more like "well hey 'eve got summ 'clement weather comin' upo 'ere". You can't sort out which word it was.

Cockney's the hilariously extreme of dropping the leading sounds of words. But, many natural pronunciations de-emphasize the leading sound and flow directly from the last sound into the next, slurring them together.

It's just odd that the language developed a prefix which is barely pronounceable at all yet completely reverses the meaning of the word.

Oznog: I have a word fetish for obscure "root" words. Where the word modified, often negated, via prefix is common, but the basic root is not.

My cubicle is in a state of unkept disarray. Once I've cleaned it, is it left in a state of "kept array"? Yes.

Yes:
A ruly crowd
A licit affair
Bouts of listful behavior

As an architectural defect in the English language, words keep getting negated with an "in-" or "im-" prefix, which is often minimized into almost nothing in pronounced speech, in fact lots of accents hack off the first syllable, rendering prefixes useless. Thus to avoid confusion the non-negated root gets deprecated in favor of the modified form. Otherwise, a Southern speaker rushing through words would be weirdly unclear on whether they were saying "clement weather", "evitable result" (evitable="capable of being avoided"), vincible (capable of being harmed in some way), or the EXACT OPPOSITE.

There are some negated by suffixes though, generally -less. Listless, reckless, feckless. "Reck" is to have "worry, care, regard". So a cautious person COULD be "reckful", which would be verbally distinct from "reckless" in almost all spoken accents, thus not confused. But is that a word? IT IS NOW!!

Words which appear to be prefixed, but don't have a recognized base word:
iniquity
inhibit
increment/decrement
nonplussed
inept

Plus, instead of doing stupid things like "verbing" non-verbs, there are plenty of words with obscure forms. "carousing" is a recognized word, but not "carouse", "carouser", "caroused"- yet they ARE real words.

Yes, yes, Robin.

We are all whelmed.

/so sorry
//could not resist
///I find them fascinating, too

Oznog: I have a word fetish for obscure "root" words. Where the word modified, often negated, via prefix is common, but the basic root is not.

My cubicle is in a state of unkept disarray. Once I've cleaned it, is it left in a state of "kept array"? Yes...

Words which appear to be prefixed, but don't have a recognized base word:
iniquity
inhibit
increment/decrement
nonplussed
inept


the root of inept is apt
the root of iniquity is equity
the root of inhibit is habit (whose root we also get the verb to have)
nonplussed is a funny (but plussed was a root, no longer in style),
and I am not comfortable talking about the clemency of your other term, because I think you get the drift.

your assessment only determines how deeply you have dug. English was an extremely morphological language at one point. It has been significantly regularized. but, It retains significant vowel mutation. If you are unaware of the standards of natural vowel mutation upon application of morphemes, you may have more difficulty recognizing the root word.

/ also, the problem is that many of the words with which you have a problem are loaned from other languages. they entered english in the modified form. the did not enter as roots which were later modified.

pute kisses like a man: and I am not comfortable talking about the clemency of your other term, because I think you get the drift.

oh shiat... should have double checked that one. increment not inclement. shoot.

K.B.O. Winston: 1. I think you mean 'shevelled' not hevelled.

2. This is a good place to post Stephen Fry's most wonderful monologue on true love of language (as opposed to love of pedantry disguised as love of language)

3. I had a third point. No bloody idea what it was now.

Merriam-Webster's sidebar video "Ask The Editor" feature has some interesting explanations of "incorrect" usages of "literally" and "ironic", and why "irregardlessly" is, in fact, "a word" in their field, in spite of whatever vitriolic, condescending protests this may evoke.

Most of which are delivered by book-ish nerd chicks, which some of us find incredibly HOT.

Felis Cattus, is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped carnivorous by nature?
Your visual, olfactory and auditory senses
contribute to your hunting skills, and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
a singular development of cat communications
that obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur, to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
you would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aide in locomotion,
it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

well, since this a pedantry thread, surprised no one noticed FTA:

Our arts and humanities education at secondary level seems particularly afflicted by falling standards - so much so that universities are now being called upon to help write new A-level syllabuses

thought this fool would have gone syllabi. Any fool with a thesaurus can show off a mastery of fancy vocabulary, only really irrelevant people can show off with fancy declension and inflection.

/ at least, my old english prof used to always say, the better we did (in old english), the more irrelevant (to the world) we became. made us all desire towards true irrelevance. I think I got there at one point. Now I'm more relevant and it's horribly depressing. thanks to fark, I can maintain my irrelevance somewhere, anonymously.

I can't grok any of this!

All that we need for a well-rounded vocabulary: "Cool" "Whassup?" and "know what I'm sayin'?"

Count_0: You will be sorry! Grue will return! People are always sorry when Grue returns!

Mendicant.