Help me find a word more pretentious than "précis"

This assertion is a bit baseless isn’t it? “Précis” seems as common as dirt, from where I’m sitting.

Let’s see what Google says:

“Write a précis” - About 50,300 results

“Write an abstract” - About 27,800 results

How is that the “niche” word has a better representation than your suggested alternative?

Write an abstract without the quotes gets Two million+ results, write a precis without the quotes gets 300,000.

However I have to wonder if its a regionalism or particular to an industry. My father has a humanities PhD, my mother has two masters (one in English literature) I have a JD, and we are all of us crossword-with-a-pen completers and Scrabble mavens – yet I have NEVER heard this word before, not at home, not in any academic context, nowhere.

I’m not sure if it is significant, but of the first 10 “precis” results, only one is an academic site, and it’s Canadian. The rest are “yahoo answers” grade results. Of the “abstract” results, the majority are American academic websites or organizations promoting academic writing.

You’re Canadian, aren’t you? Therein may lie the heart of our difference in experience.

You realize that “abstract” has other senses in wider usage, right?

If we search for this phrase, we can get a sense of the specific use of the its noun sense in the English-speaking world.

I would tend to agree that the different usage may be regional, but given our relative populations it is clearly not a case of “Americans exclusively use ‘abstract’”.

I kept running across the word ‘‘cadre’’ the other day, and it annoyed the hell out of me that I didn’t know what it meant. I looked it up in the dictionary. Turns out the person using it didn’t know what it meant, either.

Yeah, you’re right. Precis is "common as dirt,"just like, well, the word dirt, and actually twice as common a word as abstract. Those of us in this thread who think the word is obscure are wrong.

Okay, that was unnecessarily sarcastic. My point is, the results of a google search on a quoted phrase are hardly indicative of how familiar the public is with a word. “je suis” returns 63 million hits (the top 5 were all in English and I didn’t look beyond that).

winnie the pooh only returns 4.5 million.

Are americans really 16x more familiar with a french phrase than a childhood favorite? I doubt it.

I haven’t yet had my second cup of Tim’s magic brew, so the neurons that help me to recognize sarcasm when I see it may not be operating at full capacity, but yes, this is my impression. (Carefully qualified to note that we may have slightly different frames of reference.)

As I said earlier, I would never have guessed that it was possible for an English-speaking academic to be unfamiliar with the word - and yet this is clearly the case. You see an unfamiliar and somehow pretentious word, which is puzzling from my POV because that’s just the word for that. This alternate perception is every bit as counter-intuitive to me as a protest against the use of a common word like “café.”

I would be very interested to see a geographical mapping of the distribution of the word, and to know exactly where (and why) its use is out of favour.

[previews and reads second post]

This is an apples-and-oranges comparison, though. Searching for a common French fragment will return all French-language sites that contain it. “Write a précis” or “write an abstract” will return only English-language results, using each word in the specific sense that we’re looking at.

However, I see that if the search is confined to the .edu domain (returning results from only U.S. educational institutions,) “write an abstract” is in fact 20X more common. It seems reasonable to conclude that “précis” is the usual form in English, but “abstract” is more common in the U.S.

You honestly thought that “precis” was a more common word than “abstract”?

As I said in my post, the first page of results, and at further exploration the second page, is 90% English.

Or, that abstract has about a zillion uses, including all academic fields, including sciences (in which English is the [ironically termed] lingua franca and in which I have never seen the term precis), and precis is confined to a very niche field.

This is a like a gastroenterologist coming in here and saying, “What do you mean, no one’s ever heard of Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography? I use that term like ten times a day!”

To this point, I think the fact that the US has the most English speakers in the world and by far more native English speakers than all the native-English-speaking countries combined, I think what is common in the US is what is common in English.

I don’t find the word précis particularly obscure or pretentious, except that its connotation is of something more precise than a summary, but when people ask for a précis they’ll invariably accept a summary.

While I do suppose that there’s such a thing as pretentiousness in word choice, there is a vast gulf between intent and perception. People who are widely read pick up a lot of vocabulary and get comfortable with words that may not be so commonly used.

It’s a wonder to me that people don’t nearly so much resent an athlete for hard-won physical form and prowess as they do an intellectual for knowledge and breadth of expression. Merely being graceful and sculpted is not taken as evidence that someone thinks he’s better than you, yet the manifest results of time spent on the life of the mind anger people. Sure, an athlete might feel superior and let you know, and would be an asshole to do so. But merely failing to suppress the natural consequences of education marks a person as an asshole.

Of course, people do intentionally use words they expect others not to know as a kind of insult. But just because you don’t know a word, or know a less obscure word for the same concept doesn’t mean that the word was used with malicious intent, and you actually have to broaden your own vocabulary before you can reliably make this distinction. And you are prevented from doing so if everyone is carefully avoiding using “big words” so as to save themselves the stigma as “pretentious” whether fairly applied or not. The resulting feedback drags everybody down.

I’m not suggesting any solution, I’m just explaining why I don’t set a lot of store by people pissing and moaning about “pretentiousness”. People who aren’t comfortable with the word précis are already running the world. What more do they want?

This is a logical absurdity, given that the United States is a subset of the larger set of the English-speaking world. Faced with the appearance that “précis” is more commonly used globally than “abstract,” the only logical inference that you can make from the fact that such a large proportion of English speakers are American is that the use of “précis” within the US is not insignificant. (Well, not exactly - you might also conclude that American academics are under-represented online - but given the history and development of the Internet I think we can confidently declare this to be counter-factual.)

No, but it is an entirely ordinary and common word in the specific context that we’re talking about. When we’re talking about the sense of a written assignment, this is the more common word. Really. That this is contrary to your experience only means that you have the less common experience.

Among English-speaking people (as a whole) “writing a précis” is an ordinary English phrase. It’s the norm. Although its use in the U.S. may be less common, it is still used in the context of U.S. academics - no doubt a nationwide survey would find further subsets of its distribution. If I had to bet, I would guess that students at the University of Detroit might not blink when asked to write a précis, but that University of Houston students may be more likely to find this an unfamiliar word.

You yourself said that it’s uncommon among US academics, and it’s also uncommon among the US general public. The only places where it may be common is among non-American English speakers, academic or not. Therefore, it’s unfamiliar to the majority of English speakers.

And the fact that numerous posters in this thread are unfamiliar with this use shows that it’s not common. Your only assertion is that it’s common cuz you know it’s common. Cite please (besides the Google search thing).

And I assure you not all of academia uses it. I have never, ever, ever seen it in a scientific journal, ever.

ERCP is a very common term within gastroentrological circles. Would I not be a pretentious ass for throwing it around in front of a lay audience, or even among endocrinologists, without explanation?

No, I said that it’s less common. If one in twenty instructors ask their students to write a précis, that’s significant.

I’m not sure what your objection to direct evidence of its usage is. American students are sometimes asked to write a précis.

You will never find a précis in a scientific journal - the entire English-speaking world agrees that those sorts of summaries are “abstracts.”

In what way is this analogous with the situation in the OP? My assumption is that the student Lakai encountered believed that this word was part of Lakai’s vocabulary, on the strength of their parallel experience. And why not? If I’m a law student and Professor Beagle required me to write a précis, am I a pretentious ass for assuming that someone with the same level of studies had a similar assignment and that we have a shared vocabulary about it? When PA students are introduced to the concept of précis writing, are they admonished to take care to refer to their précis as an “abstract” in conversation with other students, lest they be perceived as pretentious?

But lawyers in this thread weren’t familiar with the word, and neither was Lakai. Either the legal representation on this board (including Lakai) has a poor vocabulary, or the word is just not that common even in the legal field.

Either I’m misunderstanding you, or you’re misunderstanding the numbers in your own wiki cite: India and Nigeria alone total to more English speakers than the US and so without even counting countries 3 to 134, by definition Americans aren’t the majority of English speakers. In fact, to imply that what is common in the US is the definition of what is common in the world comes across as…well, somewhat pretentious!:smack:

And the fact that numerous posters in this thread are familiar with this use shows that it is common. Your only assertion is that it’s uncommon because you know it’s uncommon. Cite please (besides the Google search thing).

Who wins this argument?

And you have read every single scientific journal ever written on any topic, ever ever ever? Wow. Even if you had, it’s still not proof that the word is uncommon. It either means you simply haven’t come across it, or (if you have read every journal ever ever ever) you ignored the word because you didn’t know what it meant.

[quote=“mnemosyne, post:136, topic:558376”]

Either I’m misunderstanding you, or you’re misunderstanding the numbers in your own wiki cite: India and Nigeria alone total to more English speakers than the US and so without even counting countries 3 to 134, by definition Americans aren’t the majority of English speakers. In fact, to imply that what is common in the US is the definition of what is common in the world comes across as…well, somewhat pretentious!:smack:

[QUOTE]

I should have specified “native English” speakers for that.

I have read enough scientific articles to know that it’s not part of the common parlance in the published scientific community.

That’s Oregon State - you know they’re pretty pretentious over there.

PA == “Pretentious Asses”

There’s a lot more if you Google “precis writing”. So many pretentious English departments in oh-so-pretentious schools.

So you’ve read the Journal of the American Academy of Ophthamology? Probably too niche.

I suppose the Ecological Society of America is also a niche in the scientific community? Those guys even used the word in their title.

The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics?

Here’s anotheruse in the title in a journal published by the rather obscure American Psychological Association.

How about Cancer Research, the journal published by the American Association of Cancer Research? I imagine their other 5 journals also use the word “Précis”: Clinical Cancer Research; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics; Molecular Cancer Research; Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention; and Cancer Prevention Research.

Nope, not ever, ever, ever used in the published scientific community. Should I keep googling?

You so well refuted my point when I said it was never, ever, ever, ever, ever (x10 billion) used in the scientific community! Bravo.