That word’s not THAT obscure

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Was in a meeting yesterday with 8 lawyers, aged approximately 27 through 50. At 43 I am the 2d oldest.

We were discussing requiring that folks use a computer calendaring system. I suggested some folk might prefer their paper and pen system, but acknowledged that I have been accused of exhibiting Luddite tendencies.

Only one other person in the room – the 50 year old – had ever heard the word Luddite before.

Now, this isn’t the case where I was using a legal term of art before an audience of accountants or scientists. Or describing new technology to octogenarians. This was a group of relatively educated folk, who received post-graduate degrees from western schools. Moreover, as lawyers, they were likely to have studied social sciences, such as history, sociology, political science, etc., curricula in which they would be more likely to encounter Luddism than in, perhaps, biology or art.

First question – is Luddite an obscure word? I consider myself to have a reasonably large vocabulary, and am aware that it is not a sure thing that all audiences might be familiar with certain terms. But I thought Luddism was pretty general knowledge, not even close to obscure, used in newspapers, mass periodicals, etc.

How do you react when people fail to understand a word you use? (I was somewhat taken aback when they asked me where the word came from. Tho I gave an acceptable response, I felt one could certainly use a word, without being able to explain its etiology. It was also a little uncomfortable, as one of the people was the head of our whole office – my boss’ boss.) Should anyone feel uncomfortable in such a situation? If so, who? The speaker for speaking over the head of his audience, or the audience for not having a sufficiently broad vocabulary?

Finally, have you had any experiences where you used a word that you just assumed was in common usage, but were met with confusion?

2

What’s obscure and what isn’t all depends on your audience, but like you said, we’re talking about a group of people who not only are college graduates, but did well enough there to get into law school, which they also graduated from. I expect lawyers to be quite good with words.

For that group of people, ‘Luddite’ should hardly be obscure.

Two stories from grad school (in mathematics, but still…):

I used the word ‘boondoggle’ in a conversation with another grad student, a very well-rounded guy (IOW, nowhere close to being a one-dimensional math-geek type). He didn’t know what I meant. Admittedly, it’s a word you see a lot more of if you grow up in the shadow of the Federal government, but I woulda thought that was hardly a necessary condition for being familiar with the word.

I used the phrase ‘by dint of’ in my Ph.D. dissertation. My advisor, also a pretty well-rounded guy, didn’t know what it meant, and put ‘??’ next to it on the copy of the draft he returned to me. Why he didn’t just look it up in a dictionary is beyond me.

The phrase is one you wouldn’t normally use while speaking, and it’s a little old-fashioned, uncommon these days (but not terribly so). But I was still surprised.

3

When I was in the eighth grade, we had weekly vocabulary lessons. I once used one of those vocabulary words (correctly – I looked it up again to be absolutely sure!) the following week in a paper. The teacher circled it in red and wrote “???” in the margin. I wonder if he was paying attention to the lesson.

4

I have been to college and grad school, albeit in an engineering field. I’m also a voracious reader. “Luddite” is a word that I have only come across in books, never in conversation, and never in school. It’s likely that people who don’t read much would not know the meaning of the word. FWIW, I’m 26.

What shocks me is that people don’t know what “boondoggle” means. I’ve never heard a definition for it, but it’s a word that, in context, reflects exactly the meaning of the word.

5

Luddite - One who enjoys and advocates Quaaludes…

Dinsdale, I think it’s fairly obscure.

6

Well, I don’t consider it obscure…but then, I teach European History, and just finished a unit on the Industrial revolution. :smiley:

But for lawyers, or any other supposedly well-educated, well-read group, the word should be in their vocabulary.

7

My first exposure to the word “Luddite” was when I heard it in reference to the Ted Kaczynski* manifesto. I would think that anyone paying attention to that case would have at least a vague idea of what the word means.

  • Boy, am I glad I looked the spelling up for that one…my guess wasn’t even close!
8

I read a lot. I had heard the word before, but I didn’t remember the meaning. (I just looked it up by the way!) But I think I could have guessed what it meant from the context.

I think it is uncomfortable for the speaker when he realizes that the audience doesn’t know a word. I have done this many times! I also think that (maybe paranoidly) that the audience thinks I’m a snob or whatever… On the other side, I usually will ask what a word means if I don’t know and can’t figure out from context. Hopefully I won’t embarrass the speaker.

9

In my college freshman comp claass, I wrote about a certain building having a “noisome odor”, which I guess isn’t a common way of saying it really stinks, but I figured if I knew it, my professor would. He marked on my paper that I was suffering from synaesthasia.

10

Only yesterday I met someone who didn’t know what luddite meant! And someone else did, so it wasn’t just me who was rejecting the irony in not embracing new words :slight_smile:

How about “muck-a-muck”? That’s normal, right?

11

“Luddite” and “Luddism” are obscure only to people who don’t have broad reading habits. I have seen the terms used many times by columnists, essayists, and other social observers. In this age of rapid technological advancement, and the displacement of workers such advances entail, the terms are almost indispensable to discourse.

I had trained for several years, learning to troubleshoot and manually calibrate and adjust hundreds of process machines in a manufacturing plant. Eventually, after seven years of perfecting my craft, computerized robotic controls were affixed to each piece of equipment, effectively rendering me redundant. As I leaned against my faithful tool-chest with my hands in my pockets, and watched the impassive technicians connect the last proximity switch to the electronic brain, I sighed, “Now I know what it feels like to be a genuine Luddite.” (Half of the equipment operators were later released because of the advancements and found lower-paying jobs or no job at all.)

In the history of industry Luddism is such a common theme that it should be a common term. Use it every chance you get.

People have to get over the imagined shame of not knowing what a word means. There are a lot of words in English and it is hard to keep track of them all. If someone uses a word which is unclear just ask, “what does that mean?”, and then continue the conversation. No problem, no shame. This is how we learn and how we approach (but never achieve) perfect clarity. Even William F. Buckley, Jr. said that when reading certain popular writers he frequently has to refer to a dictionary.

12

I discovered the other day that one of my students (college freshmen) didn’t know the word “skeptical,” which worries me quite a lot…

13

Luddite is not obscure at all! Admiteddly, I don’t get much chance to use it, but its definitely not obscure, and I know where it comes from. That said, however, I’m not your typical tech-y person, so maybe, we’re just all strange!

14

Any word to which a Google search returns almost 120,000 pages with references can hardly be considered “obscure”. Granted, Google is not Nexis or whatever database that the OED uses to establish references, but I think that result is a good indicator of widespread usage.

15

I knew what a Luddite was, too, but then I’m a hardcore liberal arts person with geeky tendencies. I can’t imagine any of my friends or co-workers not knowing, either, but then we’re a bunch of voracious readers. But I bet my sister wouldn’t know. Sometimes I think she’s a mutant; I can’t believe we have the same two parents and grew up in the same household. And the only history classes I took in college were Spanish history and a sort of quasi-Latin American history class (although I did have AP credit in U.S. history).

That said, I haven’t met your co-workers, but I think here are two categories of graduate-educated folks: those who have reached a certain level of academic achievement in a particular field, and those who genuinely enjoy learning about a variety of things. Maybe you’re in the latter category, and they’re in the former.

16

I use alot of old fashioned colloquialisms and words. What I do when others find my speech different is I just tell them “my parents were older than me and taught me some older stuff”. I have seen some very bright people not get the joke for awhile and even some never understand it and try to “correct” me. I always like to get the last laugh. :slight_smile:

17

Oh, and to answer your last question, it happens occasionally, but usually because I forget that some Yiddish words may be in common circulation in New York or the north Chicago suburbs, but not necessarily on the South Side or southwestern suburbs, where some of my co-workers are from. And then there’s my sister, but that’s another story.

18

Today I discovered that quite a few of my seventh-grade students, in a school in the poorest, roughest neighborhood in Cincinnati, didn’t know the word ‘poverty.’ I’m not sure what to think about that.

19

I don’t think Luddite is an obscure word either, but then I read a lot, as does everyone else in my family, so I grew up in an environment where the use of somewhat unusual or obscure words was fairly common. It has put me in the position of having used words or expressions that people don’t understand. I normally just explain the word and move on.

I can’t think of any good examples of this from my own experience right now, but my father came home from work a few years ago with a good one. He and a couple of the engineers were discussing the urban legend of the chicken that lived for several days with its head chopped off, with the farmer feeding it with an eyedropper, resulting in the following exchange:
Dad: “I don’t think it’s true, the chicken would exsanguinate first.”
Engineer #1: “Yeah, and it would bleed to death too.”
Engineer #2: “Umm, exsanguinate means bleed to death.”

20

I was intrigued and experimented for a while. For instance, ‘holomorphic’ gets over 100,000 hits, which I think is obscure or more, exactly, specialised - if we guess that ‘luddite’ isn’t used by some clique then deciding it’s not that obscure is reasonable.