At least one person does. I’m sure there are others out there, I just don’t have time to scour the internet looking for their postings.
If you agree that this affectation comes across as pretentious, then you should understand why “crudites” gives off a similiar vibe. It doesn’t really matter if a third of the population uses it routinely. If an equal fraction of the population started calling libraries “bibliotheques”, the remaining 66% of the population possibly still might see them as pretentious for the same exact reasons that they do “crudites”. Because it’s an exotic word used to describe something that is absurdly mundane.
Yep, and I first learned this ‘pretentious’ word many (many many) moons ago as a teen stocking shelves with Mr. Coffee carafes (also thermal carafes and wine carafes). Never were they called Mr. Coffee (or other brand name) coffee pots. Thus, ‘carafe’ was the term I learned to use. I understand coffee pot (and I have heard percolators sometimes referred as coffee pots too), but the fucking thing in your drip coffee maker is, has always been, and will always be a carafe. And if you think someone is putting on airs and trying to confuse you simply because s/he uses carafe instead of coffee pot or crudités instead of vegetable tray, the problem is yours, not the speakers.
And library/bibliotheque is a false equivalence and does absolutely nothing to prove your point. If you can’t see that, then go to m-w.com (a fairly standard dictionary) and look up both crudites and bibliotheque. Guess which you will find in an American dictionary.
It’s not an exotic word any more than “pop” or “hot dish” or “frappe” (for ‘shake’) or “frito pie” or “chicken fried steak” or “relish tray” or hundreds of other terms not understood by everyone are. As more than one poster has said, ‘vegetable tray’ is not universally understood either. I might have been tempted to bring cooked vegetables.
I’m not saying you are stupid for not knowing the word, why do you keep insisting on calling people who use it pretentious? I hate to break it to you, but your personal vocabulary does not define what is and is not exotic.
Crudites is derived from the French. It is a perfectly cromulent English word.
It’s so odd to me. When I hear a word that I don’t know my first reaction is “Cool, a new word!” and learn it. I generally assume I’m the one who should have known it, not the other way around.
This is kind of where I was going with my “homemade ice cubes” comment above. If a third of the country started using the word glaçons for homemade ice cubes (to differentiate from those nasty store-bought bagged ice cubes), I would think they should deserve to get more than a few puzzled looks.
Does the crux of this whole issue simply come down to whether or not crudites has become an official loanword?
Why are you hanging off my every word and miscontruing everything I say? You need a hobby that doesn’t involve biting my ankles like a retarded chihuahua.
I’m not calling anyone pretentious, for the upteenth time. It’s a shame that I can’t explain the basis for the perception to those who’ve expressed befuddlement over it without being accused of this, but it’s not a surprise, I guess.
It seems you need people to validate your choice of words. What’s up with this? Use “crudite” if you want. People might snicker behind your back, but if that’s the worse that happens to you in this world, consider yourself lucky.
I spent most of my life in Maryland, the past eleven years in Ohio. The word crudites is entirely new to me. I sometimes watch cooking shows, I have some cookbooks, and I have even attended some fancy parties, but I don’t recall reading or hearing this word before today.
But the door swings both ways, right? Previous to this thread and the other, you thought “crudites” was what everyone called raw veggies, according to your posts. So one outcome of this discussion is that you learned new terminology: “veggie plate/tray”.
So based on this, do you feel like you should have known “veggie plate/tray”? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not getting this impression from your posts.
Personally, I don’t feel like I should have known “crudite” previous to this discussion because not knowing it has never impeded my ability to understand and communicate. If your experience with “crudite” has been the same, then knowing “veggie plate/tray” is equally inconsequential.
Just shows how bad my Russian has become. I remember, when learning Russian, that I thought the word came from the French (which I had previously studied and have also forgotten 95% of what I learned), but I didn’t know both have Greek roots. Thanks.
Or should I be upset at you for being pretentious?
No I didn’t. I just said that I thought it was a familiar word to most. I still think that even if it’s not commonplace, many many people would know what I was talking about if I used the word. I said over and over again in that thread that there is no harm and no judgment in not knowing ANY word. I know veggie tray as well. I never claimed otherwise. I’m not sure where you got that, but I’m glad for the chance to clear it up.
What I was arguing was that using crudite would roll off my tongue as easily as other words and it wouldn’t occur to me to “tone down” that word. I wouldn’t even think of it. Carafe and other words like it too. They are native and natural parts of my vocabulary. I don’t over think what I say. I don’t assume my vocab is so special and different that I have to be so careful. However, if someone didn’t know it, of course I would be very nice about it. When other people use words I don’t know I don’t feel mad at them, either, so I try to practice what I preach. I avoid jargon, when I can. Again, the issue was NEVER whether or not someone should know any word ahead of time. The issue was, and remains for me, that the unfamiliar word to you may be a natural word for me, so judgment shouldn’t pass in either direction.
I teach in a community college with students and families from every economic/social and educational background. I am described as extremely approachable easy to work with, so I don’t think I’m too far off in my perception of personal interaction.
If I’m speaking to a non-native speaker or something like that then I make an effort to very careful of my speech. That’s a totally different situation. But then I would be very careful of everything, not just a word here or there.
Since there are plenty of words people use (like “asshat” or “butthurt”*) that don’t make it in the dictionary, this doesn’t affect my point at all. Merriam-Webster isn’t the arbiter of colloquial speech. So people can use “bibliotech” as slang without it showing up in an English dictionary. Doesn’t make it any less or more pretentious than using words that are in the dictionary.
Not knowing lots of things has not impeded my ability to understand and communicate, but learning and integrating new things I’ve come across has certainly increased my ability to communicate, understand and be understood.
It seems to me that some posters who were unfamiliar with the word crudites or carafe are the ones putting that word up on a higher shelf, while most who use the word see it on an equal plane as vegetable tray or coffee pot, respectively.
I think I got that impression from the number of times you expressed that the word is so common is to you that it wouldn’t occur to you others might not know what you were talking about. But it seems as though I misinterpreted this.
At any rate, my point is that two camps are learning something here. Not just those who were clueless about “cruvite” and thought “veggie tray” was almost universally understood by English-speakers, but also those who thought the opposite. I don’t think either side is going to permanently abandon their prefered terms, but I’d hope that with this new found knowledge, they can least try to meet somewhere in the middle without judging others as pretentious OR whining about dumbing down the language.
I guess I never realized how I benefited from my parents’ immigrant status and their total lack on English when they came to this country. Every word they were exposed to was a word to be learned, all equal in their exoticism, all useful in their own right. Rightfully so, they assumed that the “fault” was theirs if they didn’t know a word since they spoke no English to start.
My parents came to the states multilingual but with little formal education (WWII broke out when they were children). They have amazing vocabularies because they were open to learning whatever was said to them. I just realized how appreciative I should be of that attitude. I think it has served me well.
That last bit sounds right to me. Veggie tray/crudités or coffee pot/carafe, I would be likely to use either and wouldn’t see a real difference in using one or the other.
So bibliotech is slang for people trying to appear cool? I’ll take your word for it. Wouldn’t bother me as I would know the meaning. If they are doing it to be a dick, well, they’d still be a dick even if they said library. One word won’t make the difference. STILL it is a false equivalence, because as ITD said, many people using carafe or crudites aren’t doing it for an appearance of cool or as a slang word. They are doing it because it is as much a part of their everyday vocabulary as coffee pot and vegetable tray.
