I have posted here for thirteen years. I have thousand posts. And yet, in all that time, the occasion to use the word has never come up apart from the meta discussion. It’s a very specific word with very specific meaning, and it’s difficult to imagine it coming up in a message board conversation because it almost requires a personal perception – to be niggardly requires a certain small meanness of spirit, a very slight edge combined with the parsimonious behavior being complained of. I can’t imagine apply it here, where we can’t know enough about each other to know if it applies. I suppose if I were given to treating this place like a personal blog, I might eventually use it about some person I know in real life, but that’s not typically what I do.
But rarity is not obsolescence. In real life, rare though the occasions might be, the word has utility.
I’m still having trouble understanding the relevance of the distinction you draw. It seems to me that in a trial, you’re thinking very much about your audience and how they’re respond to your words. In regular conversation, are you suggesting that you don’t think about your audience and how they respond to your words? Or that you just don’t care?
And your use of the word “idiot” seems to me to be re-fighting a battle that I thought you’d conceded. Remember a page or so ago when you wrote:
I think everyone concedes that some people are offended by the word because they misunderstand its etymology or meaning. Probably everyone would concede that someone who continues to assign malice to a speaker even when it’s clear the speaker intended no malice is an idiot.
But there are people who dislike the word for reasons already discussed. So “possibly offend[ing] an idiot” isn’t the only downside of using the word; there’s also the downside of possibly making a good person uncomfortable, and the downside of possibly distracting a good, intelligent person from the meat of your message.
I care, but in the conversation, I also care about larger goals of not dumbing down language. In the trial, I only care about that which assists my client.
My use of the word “idiot” refers to the hypothetical listener who disdains polysyllabic words.
Ah, I see. So in conversation you’ve got two goals that might work at cross-purposes, is that it?
If so, that makes sense to me. For me, I think the principle of keeping a single rare word alive will almost never outweigh the immediate practicality of communicating my message clearly and without distraction. As I said lo these many years ago, though, if you’re willing to put up with the potential distraction in order to maintain a single word’s currency, that’s at least a choice made in clear realization of the consequences.
I, again, see. I thought you were using it to refer to people who objected to the word “niggardly.”