Differnent strokes for different folks and all, but using foreign words with friends smacks me of pretentiousness. If one of my friends dropped any one of those in casual conversation, they’d get one of these:
“Indeed? And tell me, how was christmas at the yacht club? Jeeves, pull the Bently 'round, I dare say I need to go monocle shopping as my current one is not bejeweled adequately. Heavens, I saw some ordinary looking chap at Starbucks the other day with almost the exact same one! D’you realize what this means?! The commoners in this city have too much fucking money!..” etc, etc ad nauseum.
But like I said, YMMV and all that.
takes notes I will say in my defense that ordinarily I’m reasonably good at being just-friends; I’m still on solid, friendly terms with most of my exes and a reasonably large number of girls I’ve found attractive but didn’t actually go out with. I’ve never had this problem with them… to my knowledge at least.
This is really good, actually, very interesting. I think it might not be all that inaccurate. May I pick your brain a little?
We’re about year and a half apart; she’s 19 and I started legally drinking back in April. Normally I really like the rule about asking three times, but she has a full courseload in San Francisco but lives two hours away (public transit), so I thought this was an extraordinary circumstance and took a last shot at it. This turns out to be the wrong thing to do, of course, but I’m guessing the thinking was flawed to begin with?
Well… I went to her school, but yeah, I thought so, especially when I said, “Look, if you just want to let me down easy, you don’t have to. If you mean it, I’ll be honored, but if you don’t, I’ll go away smiling.” Am I wrong to ask people to take me at face value?
Okay, this last bit I have a little trouble understanding, because we didn’t have mutual friends at the beginning (it would take at least three or four degrees to go from one to the other). She introduced me to a couple of hers around the end-of-February-to-the-end-of-March, and I did the same intermittently once that happened. It doesn’t seem like a really good way to nudge someone away, except maybe as a “Ohh, these two would get along really well! Maybe if he likes talking to her more, he won’t talk as much to me.” That seems unlikely, though.
These other things, these are really good. Most of them are on the order of “:smack: Why didn’t I see that?” I plead creative exuberance on the poetry one (I’d never been able to really click with meter before, so it was a brand-new, sparkling toy to work with), but I see how it could all be… uh… offputting? Overambitious? I’m not sure, exactly, but I see what you mean.
Aside to Nunavut: She called it pretentious, too, but isn’t it okay when they’re just normal for the subject at hand? For example, to choose an example from the subject, when you’re talking about writing and you want to talk about having the discipline to sit down and rewrite the same sentence ten or twenty times, looking for le mot juste, there really isn’t a better, more satisfying word for it than le mot juste. When you talk about electrical wiring, you talk about resistors, capacitors, and relays, right?
I’m learning, I think. At the very least I know where I need to correct myself. Whoo.
quote=MrJackboots]Aside to Nunavut: She called it pretentious, too, but isn’t it okay when they’re just normal for the subject at hand? For example, to choose an example from the subject, when you’re talking about writing and you want to talk about having the discipline to sit down and rewrite the same sentence ten or twenty times, looking for le mot juste, there really isn’t a better, more satisfying word for it than le mot juste. When you talk about electrical wiring, you talk about resistors, capacitors, and relays, right?
[/quote]
Well, arrive, commence and fête have all been absorbed into the English lexicon. What would you say, “I have arrived! Let us commence the fête!” or “Let’s get this party started!”. Why is the French translation of “the proper word” any more satisfying? Besides she’s just as guilty with her little Japanese injections. “Totemo”? Toooooooo precious.
Anyway, I would argue that very few people speak that way precisely because it sounds a bit pretentious. It’s a stylistic choice which is in no way analogous to the technical jargon of electrical engineers. Of course, this is just one guy talking out of ass. If you like it, then do what makes you happy.
[QUOTE=MrJackbootsAside to Nunavut: She called it pretentious, too, but isn’t it okay when they’re just normal for the subject at hand? For example, to choose an example from the subject, when you’re talking about writing and you want to talk about having the discipline to sit down and rewrite the same sentence ten or twenty times, looking for le mot juste, there really isn’t a better, more satisfying word for it than le mot juste.[/QUOTE]
You’re perfectly within your rights to think le mot juste is the best, most satisfying way to say it, as long as you recognize that some people are bound to think it’s just a pretentious way of saying “the right word.”
For example, to choose an example from the subject, when you’re talking about writing and you want to talk about having the discipline to sit down and rewrite the same sentence ten or twenty times, looking for the right word, there really isn’t a better, more satisfying word for it than the right word.