It’s ideal to read at a high vocabulary level but speak at a lower one. Please just call the sodium chloride; salt.
There’s undoubtedly some status insecurity that comes up when speaking to someone who doesn’t understand what you’re saying. Though if you’re unwilling to dumb down your own language then crack jokes instead. There’s ways of comforting an audience without lowering your own status. The job of a communicator is not to confuse it’s audience but rather reach mutual understanding and that won’t happen with anyone anything if you treat communication as a vocabulary contest.
If someone claims to be so smart then they should genius their way into a successful conversation. The smartest animals are social animals for a reason. Socialization is a form of high intelligence not separate from it.
And how is the person that fails to be discreet so much smarter? Maybe if Cassandra (from Greek Mythology) had the wits of Iago (from Othello) maybe she would’ve have lived. A truth nuke is useless if you can’t aim.
Personally, I think the whole notion of ‘premium English’ is stupid. There’s eloquent speech–speech that has the most elegant translation of thought to word, generally uses less slang, and which sometimes involves, incidentally, words that someone who’s uneducated and slow might not know or process easily.
Then sometimes, but not nearly as often as people act like, there’s thesaurus abuse, which desperately replaces every word that can be replaced with the hardest-to-process alternative in order either to flex vocabulary or make a sentence seem deeper by being harder to get through.
The latter is sometimes thought of as the former by the one plying it, but much more common is the aforementioned slow and uneducated person insecurely characterizing the first as the second, invoking this conveniently culturally pre-rendered image of a childish character ‘trying to sound smart by using big words’. This conveniently (and consistently) allows them to reverse the situation, deflecting from their own illiteracy to patronizing the person they can’t understand and even making people with the same (basically) meme picture in their head of ‘haha little boy in big linguistic boots, haha’, which is really part of the larger infuriating trend of “you did this, now in my vast genius [retardation] I am going to psychoanalyze you and declare that you did it because of, or to display, a belief that you possess a certain attribute, when in fact you are babey and poop hard in diaper. I am doing this because I am actually worthless as a debater and condescension is my perpetual crutch. This doesn’t matter, though, because everyone is already conditioned to laugh at and accept this exact form of condescension, like the citizens ruled by the emperor with no clothes, or like Amy Schumer’s audience.”
I think most cases of ‘trying to sound smart’ are really just children who have been talked down to for being children by adults who think that all children lack basic consciousness and have the mental capacity of a Thanksgiving turkey, and sometimes they carry it into older age, but not often.
Most ‘fancy’ language actually means a slightly different thing, or is, in terms of raw meaning, a plainer way of saying something, as opposed to slang, which is actually more complicated because it incorporates culture and imprecision, thus making context another dimension of the sentence that has to be interpreted. “I threw the ball” is simply than “I yeeted that thang”, because in the latter case you have to know:
-what does ‘yeet’ mean?
-does ‘thang’ really just mean ‘thing’, or is it a whole 'nother word?
-that the ball really is the ‘thang’ in question
People say ‘ooh, big word’ to mock others’ speech, even though they use longer words at the same time. They’re unintentionally outing themselves for their poor language skills by confusing obscurity with length. ‘inconsistent’ is twelve letters and four syllables, so it’s long by both basic metrics, but no one has a problem with it, even though ‘fickle’ is halved on both measures.
Hell, I usually flex my grammar by using my apostrophes right before I even think of bragging using my vocabulary, but that’s usually because I actively go in the opposite direction, anyway–I hate giving Reddit children a chance to ‘win’ [derail] the argument by saying “you used a long word. you poop pants.” and having all their kin screech in accordance and dogpile on me in what they think is wit when it’s really just regurgitation of pre-established patterns of ‘wit’.
Case in point: Someone pointed out that ‘sodium chloride’ is a stupid thing to call ‘salt’ because actual salt has other stuff, like iodine, in it. Scientific terminology isn’t of a higher order than normal speech, anyway–it’s just technical, it’s mechanical, it’s the reverse of slang that requires precision and thus lacks the comfortable malleability of slang. It’s also pretentious to use in conversation, not because ‘big words’ but because it’s self indulgent about ‘knowing a science thing’–namely, that salt is sodium and chlorine, and that chlorine provides a negative charge.
tl;dr Adults don’t need to be told not to try to ‘sound smart’, but most don’t need to try before some manbaby or ghetto caveman feels threatened by basic fucking English skills. “br thnk h shkspr” reflects a higher truth, and it’s a truth that pisses me off.
I think what people mean by big words is hard or unusual words. You’re right and that nobody has issues with the word inconsistent but people probably have issues with the word ergo or insofar even though those words are shorter. The sodium chloride thing is kind of a meme example but I do think it’s overly technical/informal. Almost nobody is calling a daisy a ‘bellis perennis’.
I agree that I don’t really hold respect for redditors that shame others for big words. I do however respect persuasive people. In this scenario the heckler is by no means impressive but those that herd the hecklers and charm their way out of anything are very impressive to me. This persuasive shepherd figure could domesticate any imbecile. It’s a powerful ability and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what you say as long as you achieve your goals. It’s typical to have crabs in a bucket that pull you down but it’s powerful to sneak past all these crabs and escape the bucket.