Nope, it’s a communication issue and does not necessarily have anything to do with age. “Normal” adults read, on average, at a 9th grade level.
It is always the responsibility of the communicator to ensure the message is understood (otherwise why bother communicating at all?), and that requires above average intelligence:
If I am speaking to a group of industry peers, I’m going to use a substantially different set of words than if communicating the same information to a group who is less familiar with the industry.
I’m sticking with the simplified version of all the above - smart people communicate on the level of their audience.
And, while a skilled craftsman can when necessary do a passable job with dull tools, he’ll generally prefer to select carefully from the sharp ones. And his results will reflect the difference.
The problem of course is one of casting pearls before swine. When the audience can’t tell the difference between fine craftsmanship and a hack job, AND the whole and entire point of the exercise is to give the audience what it wants/needs, how much is finely honed craftsmanship helpful and how much is it useless or harmful?
Back in around the 1850s there was a fashion in very early consumer product design to add cherubs and other decorations to things like scissors and sewing machines. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32677/32677-h/images/i112.png. Designers went to a lot of extra expense and effort attempting to speak an intricate and highly decorated design language they thought the audience needed.
Turns out they were wrong. Simple, robust, and cheap carried the day. Is a doghouse really better if it has fine birds’-eye maple inlays? Does the dog care?
I personally enjoy a large vocabulary and the long complex sentences that go with it. I’m not convinced my writing is actually better for that in many cases. Rather the opposite.
When I’m writing fiction a large vocabulary is literally a toolchest - and you’re absolutely right that the fanciest tool is not always the tool you want for the job. I control my vocabulary very specifically to impart the correct level of ‘intellectualism’ to the prose. (Which, in my books, varies somewhat depending on the point of view character.)
And educate me here some more please. The “sheep from the goats” reference? A parallelism to separating “the men from the boys” or an allusion to the New Testament parable? Either it seems being the sheep is to be preferred but dang, they are dumb.
:dubious:
Sometimes I would reconsider using a particular word, but it was when a co-worker told me “analogous” was a big word, I said f— it. If that’s a big word, I’m screwed trying to figure out what to edit; I’ll just say what I want to say.
That might be true for some abstract concept of ‘true innate intelligence’ that’s by definition independent of socioeconomic class and education. But in the real world of tests used to measure ‘intelligence’, it correlates with socioeconomic class and level of education.
But I’m not sure I agree trying to use ‘big words’ correlates that strongly with socioeconomic/education. Because IME it’s common in US society nowadays for people of lower socioeconomic/educational backgrounds to try to use ‘big words’ if anything more than well educated people would, but slightly incorrectly and/or where are they are not actually expressing any useful nuance. That’s fed back in some cases to the ‘big’ word becoming common. For example it wasn’t intellectual eggheads popularizing ‘perpetrator’, it was the cops. And when a dog gets on the tracks in the NY Subway they announce a delay due to ‘a canine’. It’s not the faculty at NYU driving that.
Honestly, I just get tired. I get tired of self-editing my speech. I remarked today about a “strange sartorial choice.” I caught hell for using a word no one else understood. How am I supposed to know that? I mean, what am I supposed to do, interview everyone I speak to and assess their literacy level? How exactly am I supposed to cope with that? Do I have to spend half a conversation being a human dictionary?
Aw, don’t sweat it. Just talk the way you want to and they can just get over it. Kill 'em all with big words and let God sort 'em out. (Apologies to Chuck Norris.)
Many years ago when I was a cute 25-year old, I took my 1970 VW beetle to a garage, and as the Joe Six-Pack mechanic was poking around in the engine, I peered over his shoulder and said, “I understand that the spark plugs in a Volkswagen are notoriously inaccessible.” He swiveled around and stared as if I had sprouted an extra head. Hell, that’s the way the thought came to me and that’s the way I said it.
I think you have to have a sense and know your audience. “Sartorial,” to me, is pretty clearly in SAT word territory. I’ve never heard anyone but my college educated or high school honors English friends use it, and even then, it’s pretty unlikely to come up in conversation. I use it occasionally because one of my high school English teacher’s catch phrases was “you are the quintessence of sartorial disarray” when remarking on somebody’s slovenly appearance, and that word became engrained in me.
I personally think it’s useful to adjust one’s speech to the situation and audience (code-switch), but it does sometimes feel a bit prejudicial and condescending to assume certain people won’t understand you, such that you adjust your vocabulary down. That said, for me, it’s usually adjusting my speech “up” in the proper circumstances, since I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood with parents that speak Polish, so my day-to-day vocabulary was of the garden variety. It’s not until much later in life (high school and college) that I really started acquiring a significant vocabulary.
Easier said than done and it must be noted that such is work. Judging the audience other than by way of jumping to conclusions often by way of stereotypes is a challenge. It is nice to be able to relax with friends, to not have to do that work, and to just talk.
And busting someone’s chops because they used a word you did not understand seems more like a sign of insecurity mixed with anti-intellectualism than anything else.
Sometimes though, at least when in doubt, it is prudent to use simpler words as the default, so long as we do not come off as condescending. Less human dictionaries than human thesauri … replacing the more obscure or sesquipedalian choices for more commonly understood words that do not, in the context, call attention to themselves rather than to the thoughts being communicated.
A bit different than how we used thesauri in High School in that Calvinesque manner to find the bigger words that impressed while hiding the fact that the was no there there to the actual ideas.
Maybe I’m just used to it, but I don’t find it all that difficult. Like I said, sometimes I feel a bit bad about it, because within a few minutes of talking to someone, I naturally settle into a certain vocabulary, so I’m making subconscious judgements.
Everytime I hear the term I think of the clubfooted one…
