There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious).
One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize".
Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
I intentionally try to simplify my word choice, even though my vocabulary is much larger than what I use in writing or daily speech, and even when the first word that comes to mind is long/fancy word.
I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word would do. It sounds more natural, and you don't come off sounding like you're trying to impress anyone (which is usually counterproductive if you're using vocabulary to do it).
Weeeell, there's more to it than that. English has a rich vocabulary, why not use it? Just like there is more to a palette than primary colors, why restrict yourself?
Me, I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and color. Wakarimasu ka?
My father was felled by Alzheimers. What was interesting is his sentences became an incomprehensible jumble of words, but the words were from a well educated man's vocabulary. He never sounded pretentious, it was just how he talked.
(My family does not hail from English aristocracy as far as I can discern. He was the first to attend college.)
So the scenario in question is "someone trying to fit in with the upper classes" to which your response is something like "use the language however you like"--which is a fine thing to say, and no doubt especially easy to say for those of us who have the ability to speak in the upper class dialect/register, but that's not the stated goal. I.e., if you're trying to fit in with the upper classes, using "utilize" is a tell that you don't fit in (IMO the upper class register prefers to use very few words to convey a lot of meaning; precise, terse, and fashionable vocabulary is the name of the game)--if your goal is to use English however you like, and if you like "utilize" instead of "use", then go right ahead.
I have a similar background, but I can't say I adapt my language to that of upper classes. My accent and skin color pretty much gives away my background when I utter my first word, and unfortunately, just like having a southern US accent, people are subconsciously biased to thinking I'm probably not too smart. I love using "ten-dollar words"[1] - not that I shoe-horn them in, but they are the ones that usually pop into my head first and I can't be bothered to water them down. Additionally, I figure, "dumb" accent + "smart" words cancel each other out - more or less - which puts me on equal footing with my "normal" sounding colleagues. It's easier to change/adapt my vocabulary than it is to change my accent.
I love language, I do a lot of reading, and it's a delight when you find the right word that precisely expresses what you're thinking. Reading a lot expands your vocabulary and improves your adeptness at deploying it. When done in moderation, using puns and subtle literary references is fun (even when no one picks up on it) - as long as it doesn't detract from the actual message I'm communicating.
1. I do not mean speaking like the Architect from The Matrix here. The other week, I was called out by a monolingual collegue for using "nomenclature" rather than "naming convention" or "naming system" - which feel kludgey to me. Also, when I do make the effort to use shorter words after thinking of a long one first, that adds brief pauses to my speech, which gives the appearance of an ineffective communicator.
And, of course, there's the style of clothing, haircut, makeup, accessories, etc. Pretty much everything :-)
If you talk about holidaying with one's family in some exotic locale or of having a summer home in the Hamptons, the person you're speaking with can surmise that you're not poor.
The rich kids in that documentary also regularly go out to bars and think nothing of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on champagne.
It's definitely not just about how one talks that signals to others that one is part of the upper class.. but once one is established as in the upper class, then things such as one's manner of speech might distinguish you.
> "Having lived in the U.K., I know many whose first (and only) language is English and who make routine errors when speaking and many more when writing," says Madani.
The latest horror is people trying to use the 'so [adjective] a [noun]' construction but instead saying 'so [adjective] of a [noun]'. Folks, when you say 'so [adjective] of a [noun]' you don't sound no ways educated. There's a reason that Abraham Lincoln wrote of "the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom" and not "so costly of a sacrifice"; and the reason is that Abraham Lincoln was not bloody illiterate. (It may actually have been written by John Hay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixby_letter, but Lincoln's secretaries weren't illiterate, either.) Now you might not think it makes much of a difference; but 'much' is a determiner, not an adjective, which should be clear if you think about it for a much time.
This reminds me of William Gibson's Sprawl slang, of Anthony Burgess' Nadsat slang from A Clockwork Orange, and of Cockney rhyming slang, thieves' cant, etc.
That sort of use can have a certain appealing charm to it in small doses (or might be annoying, depending on who you talk to and what you say), but unfortunately I don't think most users of "utilize" and the like rise to that level.
I'm bemused by cop jargon like "vehicle". Even journalists, when covering crimes, slip into saying "vehicle".
> rhyming slang
I like dazzuble dazzutch, but am not very good at it, fo shizzle.
Sesquipedalian means use of very long words, not quite the same as using a rich vocabulary.
> incorrectly
I sometimes pronounce words incorrectly that I'm very familiar with. What happened was I read the word a lot, yet had never heard it spoken. My mind would make up a pronunciation as I read, and eventually thought that was the real pronunciation.
It's possible that the popular disdain towards the use of long words in the US is related to this anti-intellectual attitude.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
As being told that is embarrassing, one quickly adjusts...
(Nice examples here on HN, like "utilize the periphery of the barbecue" [to place one more sausage on it].)
But a latter move to the US led to a repeat ("Hey dude, you talk like an alien?! Goofball!!") although the British accent was well liked.
"Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill
This battle is lost, but mine is "proceeded to". People seem to feel like it makes them sound more official - "He proceeded to enter the room, and he then proceeded to sit down." Once you start noticing it it's everywhere.
I shall avail myself of that advice.
Edit: Mediterraneo10 explains it better.
As a non-native speaker of English, one that I have never grasped is the overuse of the word "vehicle" to mean "car". It's extremely common, but not sure why. It's just a car, why call it a "vehicle"?
I understand it in the very generalized context of, say, the DMV. It's the dept. of motor vehicles because they handle cars but also trucks, vans, commercial haulers, even boats.
But not sure why someone says "I bought a vehicle" when really they just bought a car.
(Midwest USA)
It's a pet peeve as well, but they don't mean the exact same thing; you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop. "util - ize", to turn something into a utility, in a way that it wasn't before. Use an umbrella, utilize a leaf as an umbrella. Use email, utilize email as file transfer system.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
Really?
Because I'd use a shoe as a doorstop.
I'd never "utilize" anything.
Update: Well, on doing a bit of research in to this instead of just using my intuition, I found that you're absolutely right about the special meaning of the word "utilize", according to a number of sources like [1].
I guess I must have been too hard on those people who were properly using the word.
Still, a survey of articles on these terms shows I'm far from the only one for whom the word "utilize" sounds pretentious, so in ordinary, non-specialist language I'd still err on the side of caution and use the word "use", which can in fact be used correctly everywhere "utilize" is used.
There's a good discussion of various points of view on this issue in [2].
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
[2] - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-util...
> "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue.
I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterparts, but mostly because when I'm "translating" my thoughts into sentences I have to choose between a group of words of similar meaning, and due to my inexperience, I often choose a less "popular" one.
EDIT:
After reflecting on this a bit more I also believe I often sound formal when speaking english because it's easier to use more/fancier words for the sake of not being misunderstood than it's to come up with a short, direct sentence that transmits my message in a clear way.
It's like adding redundancy to the message for reducing the risk of transmitting unintentional errors ;)
so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too. It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.
An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese with the same words in reverse!
I even guess at words by taking what I think is an English word with a latin root, and converting it to Spanish, which sometimes works really well and at other times it doesn’t work quite so well at all!
"Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is overtly Greek, and so is "ph".
The Latinate version would be "circumference".
Yes, the English word (and the Portuguese cognate, periferia) does have a Latin etymology, via Late and Medieval Latin peripheria.
Now, the Latin word peripheria itself has a Greek etymology, from Greek periphereia. But both Portuguese and English get their word via Latin (and, in the English case, possibly also French, which also gets it from Latin, though sources differ on whether English got it from French or directly from Medieval Latin, and its plausibly not uniquely one or the other.)
The chap in question was from Portugal. If I understand correctly from your website, you're from Brazil, right? Is there any difference between how that word would be used in Brazilian vs European Portuguese?
The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal.
As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.
Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usage, mostly regarding the "popular" vocabulary. Some heavily used words in one country are less frequently used in the other. There's also a noticeable difference in the accent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthograph...
Context: I'm Brazilian and during high school I studied Portuguese "one official version behind". It had more rules, but the language itself was way nicer, and people used to write more close to it, than nowadays.
It's better to have a few mistakes due to some archaic rules than to force everything to be sterile and complicate how you pronounce things IMHO
Just let people evolve the language naturally instead...
I can tell you though, that using the word "periferia" is actually common in some place (although a bit rare in most). It's mostly used as a synonym for 'around the borders'.
The example you've mentioned: "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue", actually seems perfectly fine. It seems a little bit over-detailed, I guess that a bit context-dependent but I wouldn't bat an eye to the equivalent of "move them to the periphery".
From what I recall 'periferia' is also commonly used in TV news.
- "Eu não gosto de bolo" ("I don't like cake")
- "Eu também [não gosto de bolo]" ("Me too [I don't like cake]")
- I also [don’t like cake]
After 15+ years speaking and writing English daily, I still trip over the use of “in, on, at”.
And every now and then I have my first time pronouncing a word that I’ve known for years, from reading book in my teens. When I first tried to pronounce “phlegm” I tried to sound every letter on it.
The G is pronounced in the derived word "phlegmatic". It can't be pronounced in "phlegm"; English phonology doesn't allow for "gm" as a sound cluster.
(Whereas in "phlegmatic", you can put a syllable break between the G and the M, so it's at least possible to produce the sounds.)
- Stalling mid-talking with "ummm" or "ahh" while one thinks of more words to say
- Rising intonation to make a statement; usually rising intonation is for questions"
- Over reliance on works such as "like" ... which even now can be used to start a sentence as with: "like, I was going to the store the other day, and ..."
Portuguese is a beautiful language, and like French definitely unlike English, pronunciation of all the syllables is required. In that way it's a more athletic language. In English it's quite important enunciate the first and last syllables, while we compress or cram the middle ones.
The rising intonation is just an evolution of the language. I doubt it will stick, but it seems to be mostly used in story-telling scenarios to express some exasperating or confusing scenario in which the question is the point of the story. Almost all meaning in English is in the grammar and diction, so intonation is much more of an aesthetic preference.
Like is just a stalling word. French for example will often use words like donc to take a pause and decide how to best continue.
There is all sorts of slurring going on in French, as well. You can certainly say gendarmerie, but you'll more often probably hear gendarmrie in day to day speech. Certain subgroups do tons of weird stuff like swapping syllables of words. Mon moto becomes mon Tomo. The language is pretty famous for not pronouncing the last syllable of tons of words.
I don't speak Portuguese, but I bet you will find the same or similar patterns in that language.
We also use "περιφέρεια" for the circumference of a circle so I could say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς" to make a nerdy joke... but that supports your point.
Blasphemy! (In English, at least, circles have a "circumference" while every other shape has a "perimeter". Ovals seem to use either word.)
I never actually thought about combining "perimeter" with "circumference" to get "periphery".
I've lived in the UK for the last 15 years. I even think in English, these days.
The problem is that I keep forgetting Greek words and I find myself using English expressions even when I speak in Greek, even when I'm not speaking about work. And then I start saying things I'd never say in either language. I'm particularly shocked when I make blunders like "περιφέρεια του κύκλου". I just hope it's too early for early Alzheimer's.
To my ear, that sounds like something a non-native English speaker would say, rather than what an educated native would say. In my head the phrase comes complete with a vague foreign accent :-)
Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate to o lado that I can think of would be to suggest to move it laterally.
Lateral is a cognate. They both come from latin latus.
English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech".
For example, someone from upper class America will "purchase" something while a lower class person will "buy" it.
It's not just slight accent changes that distinguish class in America.
Beef/cow
Poultry/chicken
Pork/pig
Veal/calf
Mutton/sheep
Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It’s an easy read with lots of interesting info.
If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.
> From Middle English purchasen, from Anglo-Norman purchacer (“seek to obtain”) from pur- (from Latin pro-) + chac(i)er (“to chase, pursue”). Compare Old French porchacier (“to follow, to chase”), which has given French pourchasser (“to chase without relent”).
I end up using less common, typically larger words mostly because they have direct equivalents in English, including a whole bunch that end in -ation, which in Italian typically end in -azione.
My relatives joke with me that I'm a weird, overeducated dummy who "knows" these big words but doesn't know basic idioms.
I do not remember the word anymore, it was in You Must Be Jocking, Mr Feynman. - in the party where he was teaching in Brazil
But maybe it was just my accent.
I knew what a parabólica was as a child, but learnt the root of the word until high school math class.
I had a moment in math class when I thought... "So that's why it's called parabolica".
In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.
I wonder if it is regional or has other socioeconomic factors? Actual satellite dishes weren't common structures when I was growing up, outside either a sports bar with satellite TV feeds or more commonly large dishes on industrial, military, or scientific facilities. Other, smaller directional antenna were more commonly seen on radio towers etc.
In my general area, just a few hundred kilometers separates two groups of people who are frequently confused by each others' usage of the word "party store." Expanding a hyponym's meaning to encompass that of its hypernym is so common that I'm not even sure it requires special explanation. I've got some family members whose favorite kind of coke is Pepsi.
You'll even hear the word "satellite" mis-applied to parabolic antennas that are not directed at an actual satellite!
Seems all you nice folk think of Greeks as... posh? Must be all the philosophers :P
Education doesn't affect word choice much. The people who will say things like this were largely already saying them before they received an education.
It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages.
That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.
I studied physics so moving the burgers to the periphery of the bbq is great. Precise, unambiguous and what not. Moving them to the side may mean so many things: one side (which one), how bug the side is. Heck, is that side still on the bbq?
As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can immediately understand because it's either used internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)
A native english speaker would not have said that, unless they wanted to sound like the instruction manual, or a BBC BBQ Sports commentator. It is overly formal, a common problem that non-native speakers face.
I would probably say to move them "off to the edge" or just "to the edge". Confusingly, "off the edge" would not be correct, that would mean pushing them onto the ground!
— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and mispronounce the item as cooper shield. We had no idea what copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We all know what copper means now, but that didn't change our understanding of the shield.
A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private message in my native language from a guy who learned it by playing the game with us. Because of that highly specific misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but also which country I was from.
My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the "difficult" words being explained were often words she knew (to lament, intransigent), while the "simple" explanation involved words she had to learn (to mourn, unyielding).
This could then lead to a positive feedback cycle for native Spanish speakers taking the test - get the first few questions right, get "harder" questions with long Latin words (easy!), or get the first few questions wrong, and get "easier" questions with short Germanic words (oh no).
Her test score was indeed many standard deviations away from the paper based practice tests she had taken - but only on the verbal part.
"It seems to me" is most likely coming from the much less fancy sounding, and more casual "мне кажется" (mnye kazhetsya).
"Mnye" would be "to me", and "kazhetsya" could be represented as "it seems". I say "could be" because there is no direct translation for "kazhetsya" as far as I'm aware.
The closest (and most direct) translation of "kazhetsya" that I can think of, and retains the meaning would be "it seems likely that <...>".
What she was trying to communicate was "I think", I think. (pun intended)
First of all, I made a list of Russian я/мне lines with English translations next to them just to see if there is consistent presence of a hint in English lines that can point to the right Russian translation. There is none. So if you are trying to figure out the proper pronoun this way, you are doing it wrong.
To make an educated choice between я/мне you'll have to familiarise yourself with nominative and dative cases.
Here is some basic info on the cases in "question" and even more basic examples:
Nominative case of "I" is "я". Nominative case answers questions such as "who?" or "what?".
Кто пришёл? (Who came?) Я пришёл. (I came.)
Dative case of "I" is "мне". Dative case answers questions such as "to whom?" or "to what?".
Дать кому? (Give to whom?) Мне. (To me.)
As you might've noticed, native English speakers won't normally construct questions in a way they are constructed in most Russian cases, so I'd suggest to get familiar with cases and their respective questions first, and try to construct sentences later.
Or, depending on your goal, you can simply memorize common sentences/lines altogether and figure out why they work later.
Where I especially get mixed up with Russian is when dative and acusitive are in the same sentence. Next up for me is instrumental case - oh boy
He'd watched the series in German and then in English and knew it well enough to pick things up.
To my ear, his English was pretty good.
That said, the 2 groups of non-native speakers that have impressed me the most are people from Sweden and Norway. I've mistaken more than one of them for native speakers (to their delight) :D
A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth" because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english vocabulary.
We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )
Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word "mas".
Thank you.
But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that it is a foreign word.
Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1].
Haven’t had a chance to try it with folk whose first tongue is a Germanic tongue because they all speak really good English, but if I came across someone who didn’t have great English I’d probably use more Germanic words.
I find this subconscious perception of speech with more Latin-origin words interesting though. Something about Germanic words just feels more earthy and real, Latin-origin words feel quite flowery and sort of hard to pin down.
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...
I was taking an Arabic class and the professor was Egyptian. At one point she mentioned 'Pigeons of peace', which sounded ridiculous to my ears since 'doves' are a peace symbol and not pigeons, even though they are the same animal.
I've definitely gone with `consecuentemente` in Spanish because it's an English cognate and I couldn't remember whether I should have used `porque` (=because), or one of the annoyingly similar `por que`(=so that), `por qué` (=why), or `porqué` (=a reason).
E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue than "improve", but it's almost never a better word to use.
I got beat up a lot too.
As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about how culturally accepted it was for children to be physically abused at school in my parents' generation. People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking comic books.
It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all had the main characters getting beaten up at school as a regular plot point.
I just can't believe it. I'm so glad it is largely seen as unacceptable these days.
I've never done it myself and only knew one person who (as an adult) admitted to doing it as a kid, but apparently it is/was a thing.
When I read that many serial killers tortured animals when they were young before moving on to attacking humans[1], it somehow didn't surprise me.
The phenomenon reminds me of Hogarth's famous series of engravings on "The Four Stages of Cruelty"[2], which starts by showing children torturing animals in the streets of Eighteenth-century London.
It's appalling to me that this sort of behavior was ever tolerated.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13dogfighting-t....
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Stages_of_Cruelty
As you said, most 90s cartoon media portrays it pretty clearly, because it really was normal. The idea of children having physical boundaries was just not really as prominent back then, at least in my experience.
I think he would as well. There are different levels of abuse in the physical world and the virtual world. Comparing the worst form of online abuse to the least physical abuse would likely prove you correct. The opposite is true of the worst physical abuse vs. the least virtual abuse.
Virtual abuse is a somewhat new phenomenon only in that it is much more prolific. Prior to the internet, we had telephones, telegraph, pen & paper, and others. Abuse was common in these mediums and still is today. Because of the cheap, instantaneous, and inherently anonymous nature of the internet being quite new, I expect it will take a couple generations for society to create customs and norms that are more consistent with our physical world customs and norms.
Not sure I'd do the same with my son (if I had one, I only have a daughter).
I don't think we're better off.
I remember "ameliorate" that an american friend (an adult) didn't even know (but again this guy mixed Portugal and Porto Rico so maybe not the best sample lol), while for me it was clearly an easy cheat because I had more trouble reaching for "enhance".
Ofc since I'm also an ass, I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
Fair enough, but then French is nothing more than horribly misspelled, massacred and ungrammatical Latin.
Of course the same could be said about any other current language, after replacing Latin with whatever our ancestors spoke a couple of thousand years ago.
Except for names. Maybe I’m just not at that level, but I’ve spoken it for years and still have no idea when I see most names unless I’m familiar with it.
In regards to "amazing English", how about picking one obscure dialect like Scotish and perfecting that so that the other 95% of English speaker take you as a Scots/Welsh/Californian and don't ask any more questions?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough, there is a very sudden phase change where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English" to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between — all of a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more mundane words into it.
1. https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...