FWIW, “crudite” seems like a common word to me; heard it growing up (1970s-80s) on Long Island. If you’d asked me, I would’ve guessed it as familiar as hors d’oeuvres, chutzpah and antipasto.
HA! “Big Bad World One” is an excellent song, and coincidentally, the context of the “crudite” usage is an office party! (At least, I assume it’s an office gathering… the singer doesn’t seem to be friends with the other guests, and appears to be at the party out of obligation.)
I don’t quite get this logic. That’s not how Google results work, is it? Those 618,000 results aren’t other people’s searches, they’re instances where people have used the word on a web page. HTML makes it fairly easy to add that character (it’s just “é”).
Heck, in any event, even if you make the assumption that the majority of the results are actually cut-and-pastes, “crudite” (without the accent) returns as many results as “vegetable tray.” So what does that signify? I … have no idea.
In any event, as others have said, hearing words you don’t know is just an opportunity to learn 'em! That’s how we all do it – that and reading, obviously. If at all possible, try to just shrug and assume that the person doesn’t mean to be bitchy or pretentious, and enjoy the ability to learn a vocabulary word that saves you a few syllables.
I won’t judge anyone as pretentious if they learn to speak to their audience and not intentionally above them.
It’s kind of like talking to someone who’s first language is Chinese and is only kinda-sorta fluent in English. Only a mean person would use words like “crudite” or “carafe” when talking to them…because chances are they won’t know those words and chances are, if the speaker is intelligent, he or she will know this.
I think my co-worker knows enough about me to know that words pertaining to the food world are often like Chinese to me. Now I’ve admitted that I need to expose myself more, just to fit in better and be less annoyed when she’s talking to me, but would it kill her to speak more plainly when the conversation turns to food and I’m her audience? I don’t see why that’s such a big deal. I’m not asking her to speak down to me. But just be more thoughtful (i.e., remember who’s her audience).
I think that was you with the face’s point (why it was so misunderstood, I have no idea). Speakers need to be thoughtful with their word choices. We all need to be thoughtful. If you aren’t aware that a word is not commonplace, that’s one thing. But when speaking to a general audience, it’s better to speak plainly than like a thesarus. A part of being an educated person is knowing both the common and less common synonyms for certain words. It allows you to code-switch and effectively communicate in diverse settings.
So was my mid-west friend being pretentious when she said “relish tray”? Should she have known that I didn’t know what it meant? Should she have code shifted it to “a bunch of pickles, celery sticks, and black olives”? Is it pretentious to say “do you want the pop in a sack”? Because until I left the east coast that sentence would have made no sense to me at all; we’d say “soda in a bag”. Or is it just us folks on the coasts who can be pretentious because we aren’t real Americans?
And it would never occur to me to call a coffee carafe a coffee pot, because (to me) a coffee pot is something that either plugs into the wall or goes on the stove, and a carafe is that thing that coffee drips into.
sh1ub1, your defensive posting style isn’t really working for me. We’ve talked this topic to death anyway. Besides, it seems like I’m the only one who has a problem. So let’s just drop it.
I wouldn’t have known what she was talking about either.
But, since she’s gotten recognition from you before with her fancy food talk, perhaps she is trying to impress you rather than snub you.
Otherwise, there are plenty of people who drive me nuts, who I just don’t like, and would never choose to spend time with on my own. What can you do… ;o)
Just wanted to update. We had the event yesterday and it was huge success. We had multiple crudités (i.e., veggie platters for those of you not in the know), but people were more in the mood for hushpuppies and meatballs for some reason.
