The consequence of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity is that you wind up sounding like a moron:
Everyone knows how college students will try to make themselves sound smarter by reaching for the thesaurus and using big, ponderous words they barely understand. But now a new study shows that readers can see through this. Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, took a handful of writing samples and used a thesaurus to replace the simple words with needlessly flowery ones.
... Oppenheimer gave all the writing samples — the original, simple ones and the modified, flowery ones — to 71 students to evaluate. The result? As the grandiosity and complexity of the language increased, the judges’ estimation of the intelligence of the authors decreased. Oppenheimer wrote up his results in a paper with the gorgeously ironic title “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by fletchsliver.
see..............GRE, where one's ability to memorize thousands of useless words is claimed to equal projected graduate success
don't blame the students
So...duh.
"As the lacerates rolled down my face..." he wrote, eternally securing his place in the world's collective as Boy President extraordinaire.
"Never use a big word when a diminutive one will do."
:)
I wonder if this is because the judges themselves didn't really understand the words used, and subconciously the 'dislike of unknown' habit of humans provoked them to be more critical of the work. Thus, when asked about intelligence, they said 'less!' for the works that had more words they didn't understand. (If that's true, then they might have said 'less!' when asked to compare any other aspects, like the author's morality, wit, humor, etc.)
keep
it
simple
stupid.
if i have a hard time reading something that can be explained easily, i find another way to find it out.
Yo Skipdub, and all yer comment-"utilizing" posse, it's part of the joke. The Neatos are using unnecessarily dense language to convey the very premise of the post. Yeesh. Back to skool fo' all you fools.
You may also like my Writer's Log titled "It's not rocket science (or why jargon sucks) http://www.wordsontheweb.co.nz/writerslog.html
As one friend of mine put it, "When I was a technical writer we all strived to write as clearly and simply as possible – however – when the project managers would read it they were offended that bigger words were not used and more explanation (wordiness) was not conveyed. And they represented the customer so we of course did we as were told. So, the first rule of technical writing is that you rarely can please everyone."