Am I an asshole to use the words "infantilize" and "obscurantist"?

I suspect you’re one of those people whose speech pattern becomes more complex when you’re irritated, or angry, and that your sister was really picking up on that.

You got all huffy and she called you stuffed shirt. You’re both squabbling like eight year olds, except that you’re better at now, after decades of practice.

Ah, family.

Just so you know, Mrs. Rhymer is reading over my shoulder and says you’re utterly right about that. She also claims she can tell when I’ve stopped listening to someone as I start singing. Her testimony is of dubious credibility, however, given her poor judgment in husbands. :smiley:

I apologize to dopers for hijacking this thread, but how is the COGIC “obscurtantist”?

LIC, Phil

Not if one’s casual conversations have a lot to do with caste relations in pre-Revolution Russia, as was probably often the case for a fair number of folks in Russia pre-Revolution & for some time post-Revolution.

Actually, I find the idea of obscurantism fascinating, as it’s a way of thinking I considered for years without knowing the word. The word really wants more use, even if the idea is unloved.

Og no. “Baby” does not necessarily mean “infantilize.” I can understand someone using “baby” to mean “infantilize,” but I do not use those verbs the same way.

:rolleyes: Unfortunately, none of those are what Skald meant. He meant they try to keep their parishioners ignorant. “Anti-science” would be clearer.

Also, “evocative,” “reflexively,” & “usually” are latin cognates, as is “cognate.” Oy.

To me, that is the primary meaning of “baby”. It is not a positive word to me, even when used in the sense of “nursing” it connotes an air of excessive care… But that’s just my opinion. And in any case, it is also beside the point, as is pointing out that “evocative”, “reflexively”, etc., are Latin cognates (which I am well aware of), or the particular shade of meaning of “obscurantist” used in the OP (which I admit, you are correct, I had glossed over the parishioner anecdote).

Save your rolleyes, and let’s not let this devolve into some kind of vocabulary throwdown. My point was not “Latin cognates are bad”. It is that, in response to the OP whose title question is “Am I an asshole to use the words infantilize and obscurantist”, it depends on the context. Many early replies equate objecting to the use of such words as anti-intellectual or “dumbing down”. I disagree, and laid out specific rules by which I myself go by to determine reasonable use of them. I appreciate le mot juste, just the right word in the right context – but in a spoken conversation, the first order of context is who I’m talking to.

Throwing out references or shades of meaning that you know or strongly suspect will be lost on the recipient in spoken conversation is rude. That’s my basic rule, and that’s all I meant to say.

I then went back after my first reply (which I wrote more to answer the topic title than the OP specifically, hence my missing the parishioner anecdote and the sister having a background in sociology) and further deduced that his sister was not objecting based on not knowing the words (she clearly would), but possibly being sick of the use of such terms. I now see that j666 read the situation better. Either way, it was not a case of “you used a word you should know I don’t know, so now I’m mad at you”, but something else going on.

My father purchased some books at their convention that speak of ways to teach Intelligent Design and Young-Earth creationism, and saw but did not buy some pieces on reparative therapy for homosexuals. I looked at the YE book, which included a section on making arguments against geology and biology when talking about the Noachian deluge.

ETA: Just checking to see if I can edit as a guest.

When my sister was in vet school, we’d always get into a major fight about her word choices. She wouldn’t say, “That’s not wise.” She’d say “That’s contraindicated.” She wouldn’t say, “This will prevent you from doing so-and-so.” She would say, “If you use this prophylactally…”

Now, I’m no dim bulb. At the time, I was in graduate school and I knew what her fancy words meant. But it still bugged the bejesus out of me, especially since she seemed unaware of what she was doing. I also had my own fancy jargon I could have tossed about, but I had the common sense to keep that shit to myself. It probably seemed like I was being anti-intellectual whenever I would tell her to quit it. But really I was just being anti-nerd.

IMHO, a lot of awful $10 word usage turns up as a kind of elite code in academia (I’m an academic). This article I just finished has touches of the style. One hallmark is common words used in a different sense. “To predicate” is used active voice, intransitively (an idea is not “predicated on” another idea, it simply “predicates,” and it doesn’t predicate any particular thing, either). “Problematic” is a noun instead of a verb, distinguishing it somehow from a plain old “problem.”

The intent may be to signal that one has read certain authors, with whom the alternate meanings probably originated. Anyway, it doesn’t help to resolve finer grades of meaning, AFAICT, so I just find it obscurantist.