Once, when my husband and I were still dating, I made the mistake of telling him to put some trash in the “waste paper receptical.” He looked at me as if I’d lapsed into ancient Greek, then said, “You mean the garbage can? Just call it a garbage can!” I hadn’t even thought about it when I said it and certainly didn’t think I was trying to show off, but he certainly took it that way.
In the meantime, everything to him is a “thing.” He’ll describe an action on a tv show by saying something like, “He took the thing out of the thing and put it on the thing. Then the people in the thing said…” until I finally have to throw up my hands and say, “Start over, I’ve lost track of your things!”
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
I experienced repression in my family not only with vocabulary but with deeds that might appear pretentious. To this day I watch my language around my family. The usual penalty for using a word deemed unacceptable was for a member of the family to repeat the word with mock exaggeration while raising eyebrows and grinning broadly.
This might be a great debate, but I think this attitude goes quite a bit beyond my family and while not necessarily a conspiracy it seems somewhat less than an accident. How is it that a better vocabulary is looked upon as conceit in portions of American culture?
Then again, I remember a little kid about 9 or 10 who was checking out something or other and squealed, “Oh, how exquisite!” Why did I impulsively want to slap him. He was supposed to say ‘neat’ or ‘cool’ wasn’t he?
