fully utilizing the english language.

Discussion in 'Philosophy' started by grass man420, Dec 16, 2012.

  1. I like using big words and try to use a very wide vocabulary. when i find a word i don't know the meaning of i look it up. after all, language is our best way to communicate. but when i talk to a lot of people i feel that they don't understand what i'm saying.i feel a little bit condescending when i use big words, almost like i'm fishing for them to ask the meaning so i can seem smart. it's not that, i like it and i think it's good cause it helps teach people around me those words.

    I saw a ted talks video once that gave reasons why sometimes simple language is better. also it may be wise to have others think you're dumber than you actually are. so not using big words is a good way to do this. it used an example of how if songs used bigger words than small 1 syllable simple words they won't be as catchy.

    being good with words is a great skill in life. you will have an easier time dealing with everything from airport checkthroughs to police stops and more. the art of conversation is tricky and has many contradictions. it should be an ongoing process of self improvement. you can work on it every day. when you'r ordering a coffe talk to the attendant.

    A game that may help is to say to yourself that you will try to obatin a certian piece of imformation from an individual. like say i'm gonna small chat that person on the bus there and by the time i leave i want to know where they went to college. or their age, their taste in music, their opinion on a certain topic,etc. if people think you have ulterior motives they put up their defenses. it's all part of the game.

    Shows like Futurama use the english language very fluent to make quick jokes that go over some people's heads.one time is when fry says no i'm isn't and things like that.

    why don't more people utilize the english language?
    Is it better to act dumb to people around you? how would you benefit from this?

    i'm ripped and these are some of my ponderings. what is your opinion or view on this. anything relevant?
    thanks for reading my essay. hahaha :hello::smoking:
     
  2. I think popular media, TV and literature is dumbing down the general public's vocabulary. Spoken and written/read. For example I know the newspaper in the UK with the largest circulation has a reading age of 7...

    I guess you have to adapt your use of language to those around you, as since you say you don't want to seem condescending or aloof through the words you choose.

    In the same vein as all this, the permeation of the improper use of language on the internet and in real life annoys me... for example everyone saying 'literally' all the time and entirely out of context. Plus don't even get me started on people misusing apostrophes and mistaking words such as "their", "they're", "your", "you're" etc...
     
  3. I found the video.
    The Power of Simple Words - Terin Izil
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz8E8UOBFJQ

    Also, another way to improve your vocabulary that an english teacher showed me once is to make a line and put 2 opposites like hot and cold on each end or good and bad.. then write words like boiling,freezing, and words with the same meaning where you think they go in terms of actual temperature. it shows that different words that mean the same thing can conjure different images in your head.people have different predispositions to words. some words carry with them bias. it also shows the variety of the language we have at our disposal.

    Just my thoughts on the subject.:wave::smoking::smoking::bongin::bongin::bongin::metal::metal::laughing:
     
  4. I find stuff like that real interesting so I'll check that video out for sure.

    I actually study the different constructions of words for different people as part of my degree course... i.e. what 'freedom' means to one person compared to another, it's surprising how much cultural differences can change what we take as defined concepts in the West.
     
  5. Yeah i think it ties into philosophy a little bit too. language is so diverse, its weird how languages i'm not farmiliar with sound like complete gibberish.

    I looked up russian a bit and interesting how it's different. to be polite in English you'd say "would you please pass the salt" and in Russian you'd simply say "give salt please" it's so much more simpler but at a cost, it's less descriptive. Russian uses sounds that are not used in English. i never realized that the differences between some languages were actually like that.

    It reminds me of when i first learned about roman numerals. how they completely lack the ability to have a decimal place and a 0. it is not possible to use it in anything with a decimal place. it's main use was trading. it's also inefficient to use large numbers. It's great to see the differences between the systems and think about how they were created. it's also fun to ponder what possible languages that aliens use. maybe it's so descriptive they can convey to each other, in minutes messages that would take hours to understand in our languages. disregard their possible use of telepathy to convey messages/information.

    Let This Thread Be A Place To Discuss The Meaning And Use Of Languages.:smoking::wave::hello:
     
  6. #6 ng_hammy, Dec 16, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 16, 2012
    I found an awesome infographic online about how to communicate with aliens once... since they'd potentially have no concept even of spoken word, or numbers in any of our base systems, or hand signals or anything...

    Here we go:

    [​IMG]

    Raises some very interesting points as to what we take for granted with our appreciation and understanding of language and means of communication.
     
  7. I agree with your general theme. Being an old guy, and taught in government schools when they still actually taught useful things, it annoys and depresses me to see so many young people today who are at various levels of near-illiteracy. And they are certainly not to blame; it's just a complete failure of the government school/teacher union complex. So any efforts to throw out some English lessons seems like a good idea to me.

    As for using big words in everyday life: probably not a good idea. A good number of people will take offense to it, IMO.

    I wrote a 110,000 word novel years ago, and read countless articles and novel-writing books first to get some tips. Several thing stuck in my mind, one of them being the advice that in novels, it is better to avoid big words that are likely not recognizable to the average person on the street -- which is your potential market.

    So I would avoid it most of the time, unless you happen to hang around a bunch of professors or something, haha. But remember: Just because someone peppers their language with complicated, abstract-sounding words doesn't mean that they're more intelligent than anyone else.
     

  8. This I thoroughly agree with.

    At University (College) now, and the number of people's assignments that I read that are unnecessarily littered with complex words to make themselves sound more intelligent is ridiculous. Often using words you'd never utter out loud for how they make you sound, for no benefit to the work or argument being made, even in academic circumstances.

    So I guess there's a middle ground to be found, and tailoring anything that's written to whoever you're writing it for.
     
  9. I learned that very lesson long ago. Back in the '70s I worked at a small shop (I'm a toolmaker) that was owned by an Austrian immigrant, who had only been here for 6-8 years. A lot of times after hours a couple of German guys would come in and do side jobs for him after they got done with their regular 10-hour work day at another shop, lol. At any rate, the Austrian and German languages are close enough so that they can pretty much understand each other.

    But of course I couldn't understand anything they were saying. One time 3 of them were talking back and forth and then cracked up, laughing their heads off. I asked my boss what was so funny? He sobered up for a moment and scratched his head, then said something like, "I don't know how to translate it in English." I couldn't figure it out, why couldn't you? Then, in years since, I started thinking about how maybe slang words -- for example -- which might mean something in my state, but mean something different three states over, and how bits of language simply cannot necessarily be translated directly.

    An example I came up with then, for my own satisfaction: Back then there used to be some bumper stickers, etc. that said: "I know Jack Shit." An interesting twist on the American language. But how the fuck would you translate that to some stoopid (sic) Chinese guy who only knows maybe a hundred English words? You can't.

    I also worked around a lot of German immigrants during my life and learned that their sentence structure is sometime reversed from ours. Example: Instead of saying. "This goes around here," they would say, "This goes here around." I worked with an old German who actually said that all the time, lol. Considering all these subtle complexities, it is understandable why direct translations between languages are often not possible.
     
  10. Yeah, some interesting things about translations always...

    I remember reading somewhere once, about someone who had been told they were to visit "the palace of a thousand rooms" and were obviously quite excited by this prospect. When they arrived it turned out to be a large house, but hardly a palace. Turned out that their culture used base 2 rather than base 10. So the house only in fact had 8 rooms. Since the whole place was based around cattle rearing and hand to mouth living, they had little use for large numbers and thus used a different system.

    So many interesting nuances like this when you study languages. I think if I'd been better at them (I SUCK at learning languages), linguistics would've been an interesting subject to delve into.
     
  11. #11 Fizzly, Dec 16, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 16, 2012
    Interesting post.

    And don't get me started on the bible. I was raised in an old-fashioned Christian home, and the King James (old English) bible was the only bible that had "the truth," heh.

    Needless to say I rebelled as soon as possible, but after I left home and grew up I started analyzing the whole Christianity thing. Without anyone telling us otherwise, we tend to think that Jesus spoke in Old English, along with all the other Jews, Arabs, Persians, etc. in the bible -- most of whom probably never even heard of England.

    Then you realize that it was originally written in Hebrew and Greek, then translated into 16th (?) century English, and every fucking word as written even in Old English is god's word? WTF, gimme a break.

    EDIT: I did not intend to sidetrack this thread into a religious debate. But the above points about translating languages was a big part in my rejection of religion -- or more specifically, of the bible itself -- right or wrong.
     

  12. Exactly, we can't even begin to understand how certain things were intended to be interpreted if they've been translated multiple times across different languages, and with such big differences between the languages as we've already discussed the true meaning is often incredibly hard to translate without a full awareness not only of each language but also the culture and so on of each one.

    I'm not sure about other religious texts, but would I be right in assuming that the Bible is basically the only one where you primarily learn from a translated text? I.e. Muslims have to learn Arabic to read the Qu'Ran and Jews need Hebrew to read the Torah? God Christians are lazy :p
     
  13. Exactly.
    LOL, yes. I've seen bibles (I did a lot of studying before concluding that none of this was credible) that had side-by-side Hebrew (and Greek in the NT) to English translations. But how many English-speaking people have any clue about those languages? I sure don't. Yet it is the dominant religion in Western civilization.

    But these bibles do lend credibility to the translators -- their work is right there for anyone (who knows both languages) to examine.
     
  14. It truly is a very interesting subject.

    I'm in fact writing a research paper at the moment which is entirely based around how language is used and understood in the political arena. Based on discourse analysis of Politicians and how what they say can raise a political issue to a security one (I study International Relations) depending on the discourse they use, choice of words and so on. It's incredibly interesting reading and analysing the differences between what is said and in a sense what is said, or basically what they want it to be understood as, depending on the connotations that certain words hold and so on.

    So that was slightly off topic... but kind of related I guess is how, as we were saying earlier, the use of certain words can detach the listener from what you are saying if you use jargon and complicated language. In fact a prime tool of politicians to make you think concepts are too complicated for you to understand when most of the time they really aren't with some patient investigation and explanation. Very interesting stuff.
     
  15. Indeed.

    I think back to an old love, from a couple of states away, to which I used the word "cocked" once to describe being drunk. She had no clue what I meant; she had never heard the word used to describe drunkenness.

    And they often use big words when talking about economics, business, and other top subjects when in reality, they have absolutely no clue and no experience in any of them, but the average voting dolt -- who doesn't understand the big words -- assumes the politician knows what he's talking about.
     

  16. I feel similarly. I think some 'big' (I'd rather say uncommon?)words are more descriptive than commonly used words. I'm thinking of words like 'ethereal' or 'tangent' or 'trancendent'. Some of those types of words take a lot of simple english to get the idea across. And I am not shy to ask people what a word means if they use one i am unfamiliar with. Are you peeps the same? But i do have a friend with a vocabulary beyond mine, and we talk about random nerdy stuff all the time, and I'm thankful i can express things as i want, instead of simplifying them. And i learn new words from him. He feels it is the other persons problem if they dont understand him, whereas i feel communication is mutual so you have some necessity to adjust to the person you are talking to. Great thread!
     


  17. I agree completely, while I have not studied this as in depth as you, I think we can all agree that politicians can be rather cunning. Language is a powerful tool.

    As for op I agree as well. It seems, that while conversing with most of my peers, I have to almost change the way I talk. If I use my normal vocabulary most of them give me odd looks, like im trying to be a smartass or something, when truly I was just using the best words I saw fit to convey my thought.

    The evolution of language is also an interesting subject of itself, and it too can be used for the governments gain. If any of you have watched V for Vendeta, or read George Orwel's "Nineteen eighty-four" you could see examples. How governments can gain more power by twisting words and making the masses think that more government somehow equals more protection.
     

  18. Haha thats funny, about the politicians. Has anyone noticed if after they use their big word they restate it in simple english? To impress the 'educated' who know the words and impress the ones who just learned the big word from the politician? Anyone notice this by chance? Im trying to think back to gingrich, he seemed to have a large vocabulary.
     
  19. #19 ng_hammy, Dec 16, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 16, 2012
    Yeah, I've also had to read books from the 18th century recently (in particular Malthus': An Essay on the Principle of Population if you're interested what), and how they wrote back then is so different to now it's sometimes really quite difficult to follow. An aspect of that is his writing style, but still, it's interesting to see how much language has developed in 200 odd years.

    George Orwell's books are all very interesting with regard to the use of language, particularly the whole doublethink language, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Those in a position of power have a huge amount of influence over the buzz words in a country at the time, for example the whole concept of a 'credit crunch' was a non-entity only a few years ago, but is now in common usage simply because of it's prevalent use in the media and by elites.

    I agree with you about changing how you have to talk as well. I often talk differently depending on who I'm talking to, and also what I'm writing. If I'm writing a letter the tone will be completely different to when I'm writing an academic paper and so on. It can be annoying, but at the same time I guess it keeps us active and more adaptable to language. If I spoke how I often write I would indeed sound like that stereotypical daper English gentleman with my accent haha, but half the time (particularly when stoned or drunk) I sound more like a suburban wannabe gangster. It's all so contextual.

    This is incredibly common. If the politician wants you to understand they'll often clarify it, but if they don't they won't simply to confuse you, and increase their power and influence by effectively convincing you that their use of complex language means they have a superior intellect to you, and must know better. I find it hilarious when it gets shot down in debates on TV and so on, when politicians are accused of being patronizing or condescending and the whole principle of what they're trying to achieve with their use of language has backfired.
     
  20. Yes! I read somewhere years ago, that one good thing about the English language was that it was "dynamic." Unlike many other languages, new words pop up and sometimes get accepted into general usage (i.e.: ain't, Google, text) old words get abandoned, etc. I don't know any other languages so I don't really know, but I always assumed the author knew what he was talking about.

    Haha, yes I read 1984 when I was in school, but only have a general idea, now, of what was in it.

    But I saw V as soon as it came out, and have the disc myself. Great movie.
     

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