I’m 21 and a political science student… I’d only heard the term as part of the term ‘Neo-Luddite’.
I imagine most people my age would assume it to be a typo.
I once was chatting to a number of my fellow engineering students, and used the word “xenophobic”. None of them had heard of the word, and I had to explain what it meant. For some reason I was the one who felt like an idiot for causing social awkwardness by using obscure words.
This bio major knows what a Luddite is, and also what a Neo-Luddite is. I think anyone with a college degree should know what the word means, it isn’t at all obscure.
My personal experience has been with a word that describes what we do in the group that I work for now at a biotech company. We process patient samples in this group, determining such things as whether or not our drugs are exhibiting biological activity, or if the patients are making antibodies to our drugs.
How do we do this with the samples? Why, we run assays on them. We assay them. Sometimes our group has to develop new assays. This process is called assay development.
You wouldn’t believe the blank stares I have gotten from college educated people when I have used this word in this context. Do people really not know what it means? Does the “ass” part throw people off?
An example of an expression that I used that at least one person had never heard before was when I mentioned that one of our incubators (which normally have to be rather humid) had run out of water and was therefore “dry as a bone”. You would have thought I had rattled off some obscure Sanskrit verse instead.
I know the word and wouldn’t have thought it that obscure. I’m 42 and in software development.
23 year old with a law degree here. I have a business school background, but I know what the word means. Like the consensus above, I believe most lawyers should know the term; historical usages aside, “Luddite” is commonly used by feature article writers in a wide range of fields.
The standard response I would give is that YOU should know your audience and tailor your speech to fit their level of understanding. Don’t use technical terms or words of art to a lay audience, and at the same time don’t ever patronise or baby an educated audience. However, in this case I think you were quite blameless–you had an entirely reasonable expectation that your audience would have understood the word used. As it turned out they didn’t… but I don’t think you could have anticipated that. I mean, they could at least have inferred the word’s meaning from the context used!
Luddite isn’t to obscure. I think the word orgin is obscure, but not the word.
Of course, at work, there was one girl who, upon hearing the phrase “I hate working with incompetent people,” looked at me with all seriousness, and asked “What does incompetent mean?”
Another phrase that has lost it’s edge is fuddy-duddy, made famous by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. (At least, that’s what he said it was after being asked about it…hehe)
Damn. I hate it when this happens.
I have a B.A. from Vanderbilt and I taught high school for twenty years.
I did not know what Luddite meant.
For someone in liberal arts, my education in world history has been extremely poor. Apparently, I should have known.
I have been chastened by my college-educated peers for using “big words” (surfeit) to describe the problems in our workload (and went home, that night, to catch Mel Brooks using it on TV in the Muppet Movie), and for “making up” rivulet when referring to a series of small streams of water from snow-melt in the parking lot.
It happens.
Of course, when you are tracing the etiology of some diseased word, you are quite likely going to lose part of your audience.
They’re BEGGING for it! I’ve never heard a clearer invitation to make someone look stupid by using short but obscure words 
I’ve been subscribing to dictionary.com’s word of a day. Here’s the last ten words:
obstreperous: noisily and stubbornly defiant; also, boisterous.
serendipity: the faculty or phenomenon of making fortunate accidental discoveries.
yen: a strong desire or inclination.
timorous: full of apprehensiveness; fearful.
irenic: promoting peace.
bilious: of or pertaining to bile; also, ill-tempered.
galvanic: pertaining to a direct current of electricity; also, having the effect of an **electric shock.
pantheon: the collective gods of a people; also, a group of highly esteemed persons.
slaver: to slobber; to drool.
unguent: an ointment.
What’s interesting is that I know almost all of the words, (and would class about half as ‘obscure’), but someone else is likely to be saying “‘irenic’? That’s obvious! But wth is ‘yen’?” We just pick up different words.
I read a lot, and I try to revive old words that seem to be going out of circulation. One example: “blatherskite” (a person who talks a lot without saying anything)-does anybody ever use thhat word? Please try to use it…its one I would like to revive!
Also “plug-ugly” (from 19th century New York…from the gang
I always find it amusing to use old words around twenty-somethings…sometimes they haven’t a clue about what I’m saying!
Yiddish-derived words are great-I like words like “schmuck”, “schlep”, and “kibitz”…sad to say, it seems these words are dying out…1930’s slang is also great…but again, the generation that used it is fast dying off!
A quick straw poll round my office (twenty-something year old physicists) suggests that:
a) Luddite is not obscure
b) Its origins aren’t obscure either.
Some ten years or so ago I was in a meeting with some of my employees where we were discussing an upcoming project. My boss sat in. I used the word “cull” as part of the description of what we had to do (cull out bad data), and my MBA/CPA boss spoke up and said “that’s not a word” and laughed at me! I learned to use little words around this man. Like dumbass.
Rest assured, all my kids now know the def and etiology of Luddite. (As the teeming millions share yet another sigh of relief that they do not have to share the Dinsdale dinner table…)
I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a deal with my kids where they get a buck if they know a word I cannot define. I don’t think any of them has gotten more than 2 or 3 bucks off of me. Really pays off such as last weekend when I was riding a ski-lift with my 14 year old son, and he was marvelling at the “ephemeral” quality of the fog.
In the Luddite instance, what really surprised me was not that someone just said, “what does that mean?” but that they pressed harder and asked where the word came from? Who knows? Maybe they thought I was cussing or something!
I clearly recall when Mrs D and I were both still in law school, and we attended a wedding in mid-Illinois. She brought the table’s conversation to a halt by expressing her view that all of the pro football teams were fungible. I would have thought that word was familiar to college educated folk in the middle of corn and soybean country.
And when my eldest was young, we were talking with another couple of young parents – he a lawyer, she a social worker. He mentioned baseball, which I said I had no use for other than for its soporific effect. Fer crying out loud! Beatrix Potter used the damn word, and they had a 3 year old daughter. What were they reading to the poor kid?!
Which brings up the topic of dumbing down literature. In our family, the Luddism discussion turned to soporific, which sent one of my kids to the shelf for source material. Came back with a beautiful volume of BP’s collected works. Which did not describe lettuce as soporific! Nor did Peter’s father have an accident where he was made into a pie by Mrs McGregor! Horrors! BP’s work had been “adapted!”
If ever there were a clear sign of the impending apocalypse… What the hell would someone think they were protecting children from. The evening was concluded by the Dinsdale family ceremonially burning the offending volume in our fireplace.
I’m reminded of when I described something as Fellini-esque at dinner w/ my p’s, 3 sibs and their spouses. I was astounded that only my wife and my mom had any idea who Fellini was. (No, I didn’t marry a gal just like dear old mom!) I’m not saying they couldn’t recite his filmography. They couldn’t even say, “Wasn’t he some guy somehow involved in movies?”
I find I make assumptions all of the time as to what I expect others to know as a foundation for discourse and interaction. I’m a lawyer who does a lot of oral advocacy, so I am generally pretty aware of my specific word choices. If I think something might be obscure to my audience, I intentionally use it in a context that should explain it, or will even follow it up with an explanatory clause. I’m sure I often come across sounding like a pompous windbag, but I always feel that if a word means exactly what I want to say, and even more if it is fun to say, or if it suggests an interesting tangent or reference, well by all means use that word instead of some more pedestrian near-synonym.
It sort of shocks me when I find I have so misjudged in this manner.
I have a “reader’s vocabulary” according to my mother. This refers to the fact that I know a lot of words, but sometimes pronounce them funny if they are not often used. My mother is not the only one who has commented on my interesting vocabulary, but she is the only one who wants to know not just what a word means but HOW DID I KNOW IT. Most recently, we were eating dinner and listening to NPR and some guy was talking about the FCC and Bono(I think) and how he said something was “Freaking Terrific” only he didn’t say “freaking”.
This reminded me of how I was watching “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” earlier in the day and a woman was askedc what the N in SNAFU stood for. She identified it correctly but refused to say the whole phrase. (I suspect she was afraid of getting it wrong, but she may have been unable to come up with a version in which the F stood for something appropriate for broadcast television). Well, my mother did not recognized SNAFU and had NO idea what it stood for. What’s more she was so fascinated by it that she asked me what it stood for at least one more time over the next week, I think she was planning to see if her co-workers knew about it or something, but maybe I’m wrong. It just bewildered me that she was so puzzled by it.
I’m a college graduate, and I read daily, but I don’t know what Luddite means.
None of the dictionary quoters have bothered to define it in this thread either. So I guess I gotta go to dictionary.com while this board shuts down again.
Don’t tell anyone but I just had to look it up too. For all of the rest of us too embarassed to admit it, apparently it’s someone who fears change brought on by technology.
I was familiar with the word Luddite but never really ran up on it often until The Lord of The Rings movies came out. There have been a number of documentaries about Tolkein around since then and I have heard him referred to as a Luddite in more than one of these films…and the films explained what Luddite meant.
Guess your colleagues missed them.
Just be like me and eschew obfuscation.
I hadn’t a clue what it meant, and I read a lot and have a minor in history.
Okay I am a lawyer but I’ve known what a Luddite was since Grade 9 History. Didn’t anyone else take the Industrial Revolution in high school?