I don't think it's necessary to use big words to make a point the more I care about getting a point across, the more effort I put into making it as simple and clear as possible
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Replying to @visakanv
I have a contrarian view on this (I’m also confused) I find using big/rare words can help convey a sense of authority when speaking which makes you more persuasive When you make prose too simple it’s profundity can get lost
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Replying to @thepericulum @visakanv
Depends on what the speaker's goal is. If the goal is information exchange, verbosity is usually unhelpful. If playing status games, then verbosity can be very useful. If a statement is too hard to parse the listener may just give up and defer to the speaker's "expertise"
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As an added bonus: the underlying statement doesn't even have to make sense for this to work! Any statement if sufficiently jargon-ified can become so hard to parse that many will simply choose not to
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Replying to @dinglevery @visakanv
Jargon is necessary to understand deep topics. You need the compression that it provides to deal with the limited bandwidth of the verbal
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An example of a great writer that uses big words is
@vgr and I find it delightful that he does His writing would not be nearly as rich in detail if he didn’t have such an expansive vocabulary filled with technical jargon and literary references1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @thepericulum @dinglevery and
The problem is that most people use big words to seem smart and often don’t know how to use them properly leading to confusion. But when used properly, big words are extremely potent, providing precision and clarity where common vocabulary can be broad and ambiguous
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big words are like prime numbers, they cannot be perfectly factored out into smaller numbers... and unlike with numbers, the proportion of big words increases as you go down a word list ranked by frequency... beyond about 4000, all words are big words
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