alex wrote:
sigholdaccountlost wrote:
Yep when I'm talking to myself or my stuffed toys. I dumb it down for other people...unless I want to insult them.
well, yeah. then i just call them a Gnathostomulida. Oddly enough, that tends to be a fitting insult in most situations.
Well GEE, then you ARE showing off! Lately, you seem to be really against such things. HEY, most of the posts here have had pretty sedate verbiage and weren't even nearly as ostentatious as this post, let alone the one about ethylated libations!
Does anyone here think it is REALLY showing off if you just don't ask yourself if the word is common enough to be used around the "hoi polloi"? BTW I don't normaly use that term. This may even be the first time. Given the circumstances, I couldn't resist!
Sorry if that sounded too pretentious.
At my last contract, for some unknown reason, a guy was asking me about some arcane words. They weren't words he would ever use there, and it was doubtful he would even ever want to use them. He made it clear he just wanted to know if I knew them, and several times asked why I was the only one he knew that knew these words. And NONE were as unusual as "Gnathostomulida", or did you mean "Gnathostomulids".
Many were words such as "modicum". Though that is a bad example, because it is not so uncommon or long, it is the only actual example I can think of at the moment. I never bothered to remember them all.
BTW I don't think I have ever even really used modicum before.
It IS odd. I get asked some odd questions sometimes. Like one guy at a school I went to asking me about what temperature scales I knew. I started with KELVIN, and he shutup.
Steve