I have never heard the word “précis” used until yesterday. How common is this word and is there something even more pretentious that can be used to describe a summary?
I only ever heard it in a high-school english class, where the teacher was some pretentious cocksucker. Oh, and there was some crappy Mitsubishi car with the name, too.
I’ve never gotten why people think it’s pretentious to use a word that they don’t understand or that isn’t used that much. Is it related to the same reason we think it’s a terrible thing for our politicians to be, gasp, elitist?
because there’s an English word that means the same thing. If you say “précis” when you could say “summary” or “abstract,” you’re a pretentious ballwasher.
As a native French speaker, “précis” to me sounds about as pretentious as “accounting report”. It always facinates me how Americans seem to think that French words make everything sound so bloddy frou-frou snooty glamerous.
It might even be useful as a word that connotes a concise overview of a situation.
That being said, do you find “synopsis” as pretentious? I would wager it’s equivalent in terms of degree of vocabulary sophistication, though I would have no idea how to measure that. It dertainly doesn’t have that gallic “je ne sais quoi…”
Now, it always seems to me that whenever someting is deemed to be pretentious, there is always a component of resentment on the part of the deemer. Yet this is the Straight Dope, after all, where good syntax, grammar, punctuation, and yes, even good vocabulary, is appreciated, if not cherished, presumably also by you, Lakai,. So what gives, did the person who used that word tick you off in any other way?
I heard it used frequently at university. It’s not uncommon in my workplace. It’s not pretentious.
Why is it so pretentious to use another language? I’m not being snarky–I’m genuinely curious. Do people who only know English feel resentment at the idea of people using another language? Is it threatening in some way? I don’t understand why it makes someone pretentious. I think it’s interesting to see how other languages influence our own.
Yeah, not getting “pretentious” out of it. Maybe because it’s a regular, workaday word. My god, someone’s using a word that has a more common synonym? I expect summaries on the IMDB, abstracts in academic or professional journals, and précis in criticism.
If you’re hung-up because it’s a loan-word, your vocabulary ought to be much more limited than the norm.
The person who used it isn’t pretentious. Far from it.
The reason I think it sounds pretentious is because I’ve never seen it used before. Whenever a less popular word is used instead of a more conventional word, without adding any clarity or meaning, it comes off as pretentious to me.
By that rationale, anything you haven’t heard of is pretentious, though. Hell, to someone who doesn’t know the word, “clarity,” you could be pretentious. Why not take the opportunity when you hear something new to learn from it instead of putting the person down because they know more than you?
The first time I heard the word was in 11th grade English class. We had to write one. I seem to remember it being more involved and detailed than an abstract, but that class as 10+ years ago. Is a precis (sorry–can’t figure out the accent-ague right now) the literary-journal-equivalent of an abstract?
I think pretentiousness in general is a function of word and context. Used in an academic setting, precis is absolutely not pretentious. However, if I’m a sales manager and I tell my staff to “write me up a precis of your activity today,” that is most definitely pretentious.
Using the word “pretentious” is itself pretty pretentious. What’s wrong with using “affected”, “highfalutin”, “ostentatious”, or “pompous”?
I’m willing to accept the level of awareness of the word within the general public as my standard.
ETA: I also think claiming that using the word pretentious is pretentious, is pretentious.
FWIW I read in a car magazine around that time that it was supposed to pronounced “pree-sis”, thus sparing any prospective customers from owning a car whose name they couldn’t pronounce. I believe it was a twin of the Hyundai Excel, which itself was a model which Hyundai would probably rather forget, now that it’s expanded the model line-up and gained a significant amount of cred.
Well, la-di-dah!
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You can’t be serious. French in particular was long considered a language of the upper-crust elite who had the time and money to pursue such frivolous endeavors as learning a foreign language in school instead of, you know, working. Nowadays any word whose sole purpose is to point out the speaker’s level of education when there are other, more common words available to describe the same thing smacks of pretension.
Can you picture Billy Tiresalesman from Alabama going around talking about the précis he just read?
Why the heck not? I’m sure he would have no problems telling his huntin’ buddies where the “rendez-vous” point would be to hike to his duck blind, and the best “route” to get there, especially if he did a little stint in the military, which I undersstand is not all that uncommon in that neck of the woods.
I get that that’s what some people think…but do people actually take that viewpoint seriously? Especially on a message board that promotes fighting ignorance? If someone is so against learning anything new because it smacks of “book-larnin’” then why bother being on a site like this one?
These words you just used were derived from French:
serious
particular
considered
language
elite
pursue
foreign
purpose
available
pretension
There are a few others that skipped French altogether and are derived straight from Latin.