Thread for words you never bothered to look up & one day you realized "I still don't know what that means"

great thread!

in quiet moments i have turned to ilx for words to websterise & learn online, it's good to have another depository for them

I thought sallow meant pale in a way that could be complimentary. O shi.

this reminds me, when I went to apply for chinese courses at my uni, I wanted to explain to them that I was illiterate (couldn't read or write but could speak and hear pretty well). so I told them I was a 流氓 when I meant to say 文盲 - the former means bastard or hoodlum. ;_;

We must spread the word 'insaniacked' all over the interweb. I will do my part.

obdurate

learning new meanings for words you thought you knew is also key too for this thread. for example 'the standards obtain' etc.

i tried following the whole "hauntology" thing a few years ago and never really figured it out.

that's made up tho

http://www.dailypuppy.com/media/dogs/anonymous/pepper_pug.jpg

whiney always assumed "hauntology" was a red flag for "i'm a hackademic windbag" and unsubscribed all those blogs from my RSS reader

what bugs me are those phrases that are used in fancy-like writing that everybody seems to accept even tho they make no sense. like "must needs". what the fuck is that about.

xp lol well "hackademic" isn't that much better

yeah, jargon. bleh.

jargon is the opposite of copacetic in my experience

also very relieved to confirm that callow meant what I thought it meant, this thread had me hardcore second-guessing

?? jargon is great, wtf

gimme a bona fide colloquialism over corporate jargon any day of the week

jargon tends to be unnecessarily obfuscatory, it's basically like "this knowledge is all that makes me special, ergo I will make up a language for it so that I look prettier"

totes^^^

also lingo > > jargon

hauntology was late derrida's poisonouse gift to the english langauge, latterly revivified as terrible hackademic crit theory meme & silly english chillwave analog

poisonouse

sometimes jargon is a good and necessary thing, other times you have things like the medical profession's predilection towards turning everything under the sun into an acronym (commonly referred to by doctors as "TEUTSIAN").

hahaha derridas is trolling over in his grave

--for some reason had to always look up "self-aggrandizing" before deployment---could never remember if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

--embarrassingly misused "effete" once in HS but can't really remember the details

leave me out of this, HI DERE

haha sorry, I could throw daggers at the computer profession as well but instead of being funny it would just be sad and pathetic

"shop talk" >>> technical argot >>> lingo >>>>>>>>> jargon

by the way, I never knew what excelsior was until I came here, and even now I'm still mystified as to why it means what it currently means on this board

itt...wood shavings

i really, really love listening to professionals talkin in their secret pro twin talk

hantavirus intrauterine diuretically excreted relapse emissions, apparently

'quincunx'

i love acronyms

whoah had no idea about excelsior---always associated it with stan lee, tbh

language evolves because people want to express things easily. people who are engaged in a specific activity necessarily end up in their own linguistic sub-world. i don't think anyone comes up with jargon for the hell of it.

excelsior means higher and somebody used to shout it on a mtn? r something, dunno why it means what it means on ilx either

"excelsior" as used on this board means "that witty bon-mot so amused me that I spat tea onto my keyboard and shorted it out, giving myself enough of a shock in the process that I have also soiled myself and now have to explain to my boss why I need to buy emergency underwear and pants in the middle of the day without also tipping him/her to the fact that I waste all day making jokes on the internet instead of doing what they're paying me for"

idiolectal looool xenocentrism

Excelsior: also the motto of NY.

i don't think anyone comes up with jargon for the hell of it.

probably not, but some jargon can be used to conceal meaning from the uninitiated

language evolves because people wanna talk about the same shit in a different way

and i'm trying to think of an example of jargon that makes meaning "easier" for all involved

this thread is very informative btw

probably not, but some jargon can be used to conceal meaning from the uninitiated

boo hoo!

I think you meant "blood diamonds"

also, annoying abbreviations aside, i love the precision of medical language, even if it is dense. kinda have to walk a fine line between colloquial explanations and high-test medicalese, though, when telling patients stuff, i think---some ppl hear plain talk and think yr a quack (cf Louis CK's bit on "head full of cancer"), others hear impenetrable lingo and think yr a hoity-toity know-it-all a-hole

eh i think a lot of the time jargon comes from trying to have a word that more narrowly means something than its synonym but without partic baggage from other contexts that those synonyms are also used in that might confuse what u r talking abt.

american military pentagonese is the worst, full of wtf acronyms for scary weapons and strategies

interestingly enough, I think the density caused by the precision of medical language (which I also think is awesome) is a direct causal influence on its propensity towards acronyms (which I find kind of funny)

xp: oh yeah, nobody acronyms like the military, although there I can see a stronger reason for speaking in obfuscatory terms as it's basically like training your force to speak in cyphers

"jargon," to me, seems almost necessarily tied to obfuscation. like, it's a sort of code-switching that happens when some subset of ppl in the room want to have a conversation unencumbered by deference to ppl not in the know. or when they want to get "credit" for relaying information to someone (in the most precise way possible!) while knowing full well that the exact opposite has happened.

"lingo" or "shop-talk" is just the natural evolution of a profession's conversations with itself. it's basically just slang, but it enjoys a little more respect because its practitioners, you know, have jobs.