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morrowasted
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Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe
#19395608 - 01/09/14 07:47 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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do u like it when words become letters? i do. it makes a lot of sense from a phonological standpoint, and that's the last time this post will make any discernible amount of coherent sense. u no wat i hate tho? needlessly big words like "phonological", "discernible", and "coherent". who does that shit? fuckin hipsters. a big word is like a song title that's 10 words words long or a band name with symbols in it. nobody is gonna remember that shit, jackass, just speak like the rest of us self-respecting, honest, people and stop acting like u got something to prove.
do u like cars? if not well too bad, so sad, señor fuck-o the first, cuz coming rapidly (that means rly fast) your way is an extra-juicy car metaphor that I hope will succeed in showing you why those big, mean, ugly words that people who don't mind being known as true-grit heavyweight 'intellectuals' shot-put at one another as if they were ego-powered, shot-put-shaped-ninja-stars, (in a brutal[ly boring] competition of legendar[il]y [pitiful] proportions that can only end, of course, when one intellectual uses a word for which the other intellectual can't recite Webster's definition without the use of an iPhone*) are sometimes actually kind of just a wee bit interesting if you like, think about it and shit, or, if not that, then, you know, at the very least, they actually turn out to be ever-so-slightly (aka quite) useful when used the really really specific kinds of conversations that they were created to be used in.**
YOUR extra-juicy metaphor, which, for your convenience, I have allowed to be ruthlessly brutalized by Google's "English->Dumbese" translation software, here and now to be served up fresh and ONLY FOR YOU, THE READER, on an unquestionably appetizing list-shaped silver (or blue, whatever, fuck off) platter:
big, fancy & relatively new words- like, for example, the word "neologism"- much like big, fancy, new cars, very often come with "fully-loaded" with super awesome features such as but not necessarily limited to:
- a relative shitload of interior space (at least compared to old, outdated clusters of small words like "new" and "word"). Very often this space even comes fully lock, stocked, and loaded with a bunch of shit you actually can actually use. Rearrangement of your brand-new useable shit is often much easier to accomplish than it was with your old car! There will always be enough interior room left over so you can put a little more shit in there if you need to, but you might need to move some parts, which brings us to.....
- parts that move in a way that is actually useful because it results in shorter sentences whose meaning is less likely to get lost in the massive and often downright ugly clustering of the old word phrases that would be required to achieve the same effect. for example, the terminologically-dense sentence, "Recursively generated outputs are defined by their subsequent neologistically-determined categorical differentiation." would have to be written in "old/small/dumb words" as something like, "the words my program creates are divided into overlapping categories in a way that you can think of as working like a venn diagram, according to the order of their letters, the ancestral word precedents that inspired their creation, and what they mean, in a sort of process that 'loops back' on itself every time it finishes in a unique way that is the same in the sense that the computer program code but different in the sense that the information being processed through it has changed since the last time it ran, by using the information that was gathered during the just-finished word-sorting process in order to create a completely new word which shares none of the variations of any of the three kinds of properties of a word I made reference to earlier in this sentence in common with any of the words that the program has already created," (breathe), if you wanted to express the same exact idea to someone who has no familiarity with the potentially applicable terminology.
- sex appeal!!! drop a big word at the right moment and dumb skanks will not infrequently make the false assumption you are some type of scientist or doctor or computer nerd (or whatever cuz let's be honest she doesnt really give a shit what you do for a living, her interest has been piqued by the fact that she has just located a potential opportunity to do you for a living).
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE! KIND OF. NOT REALLY. ACTUALLY I DUNNO IF IT COUNTS AS MORE OR NOT. I WILL NOW TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO EXTOL WHAT I CONSIDER TO BE THE GREATEST VIRTUE OF THE MASTERPIECE WHICH HAS JUST BLESSED YOUR LIFE WITH ITS PRESENCE.
Certainly by now you have already realized that you have just encountered a masterpiece of metaphor- you know the type. Metaphorical crafting of this caliber has been known to shock poets into their first genuine existential crisis, in response to which they are not infrequently found driving in cars and wearing shoes that cover the entire foot. Alas, my friends: the fuckedness of your mind is about to increase by many orders of magnitude.
You have, in fact, and without realizing it (since you are undoubtedly a neophyte of neologism at best and, quite honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of you were to lose in the previously described intellectual battle-royale against Hodor himself) just read and perhaps even managed, thanks to my gracious willingness to translate it into Dumbese, to partially understand a metaphor which exemplifies respectable usage of a new word using a word which itself means "newly created words, often created for use in specific contexts."

Ur damn right u gatdamned hooligans.

ACUALY THEIR IS MOAR! just a bit tho
moral of the story: dictionaries are heavy and thus make highly effective (and more importantly ironic but i don't think god himself could explain the meaning that intellectual douchebags intend when they use the word irony) weapons for heaving at great velocities (that means rly fast) in the general direction of anyone you see who appears to get his jollies doing anything that involves books or schools unless it also involves fire.
*(The winner of the intellectual battle-royale celebrates his win- alone, to be sure- by basking in the sublime & radiant glory of his intellectual..ness, having temporarily squashed his insecurities into the shadows with the unquestionably empowering self-assurance which has of course resulted from his superior demonstration of that oh-so-vital skill where you use the most obscure word possible inside of a context that is specifically counter-productive to using that word. this skill so incredibly vital that humans, of course, long ago crafted a word for it... oh wait. my point is obv. that all intellectuals are ego-driven douchebags who are continually in need of gentle reminders of that fact in the form of a severe ass-beating).
**You may have overheard this type of conversation taking place between small groups of overweight neckbeards whose complexion would demand SPF60 in the unlikely event that their skin were ever to come into contact with sunlight.
 MISTER T SAYS: I pity the fool who whittles his life away reading a hundred posts that say shit like "LOL" and replying to this thread with TL;DR
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stzacrack
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted] 2
#19395680 - 01/09/14 08:00 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Just as I enjoy books that require many different levels of reading comprehension, I also enjoy conversing with people who may have many different sized vocabs.
I believe if large words make s one unsettled it is a reflection of ones own insecurities. I say who cares? The content of the book or conversation is much more important than the way either is conveyed.
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birdland

Registered: 07/24/11
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: stzacrack] 1
#19395728 - 01/09/14 08:06 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
stzacrack said: Just as I enjoy books that require many different levels of reading comprehension, I also enjoy conversing with people who may have many different sized vocabs.
I believe if large words make s one unsettled it is a reflection of ones own insecurities. I say who cares? The content of the book or conversation is much more important than the way either is conveyed.
Agreed.
Variety is the spice of life. Different words with similar meanings are like different shades of the same colour. Or as a musical simile it's like playing the same note but with a slightly different tone.
Edited by birdland (01/09/14 08:07 PM)
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Hellogoodbyedeath

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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: stzacrack]
#19395733 - 01/09/14 08:08 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
stzacrack said: Just as I enjoy books that require many different levels of reading comprehension, I also enjoy conversing with people who may have many different sized vocabs.
I believe if large words make s one unsettled it is a reflection of ones own insecurities. I say who cares? The content of the book or conversation is much more important than the way either is conveyed.
QFT. As long as the person isn't trying to be lofty or pretentious about it, I think it is fine. Challenges me.
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berdinwall
<3 whooooshhh


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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: Hellogoodbyedeath]
#19395755 - 01/09/14 08:12 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Can you add a tl; dr portion?
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berdinwall
<3 whooooshhh


Registered: 06/10/12
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: berdinwall]
#19395761 - 01/09/14 08:13 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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morrowasted
Worldwide Stepper



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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: berdinwall]
#19395832 - 01/09/14 08:28 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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lol based on replies it seems to me that that nobody who has posted thus far actually read the OP
either that it turned out more incomprehensible than I intended
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FrozenHappiness
Professional Cereal Box

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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: birdland] 2
#19395837 - 01/09/14 08:29 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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 Sometimes those very words you detest strongly dislike so much are the most appropriate ones to use. If these words are used correctly they can make sentances more consice not have as many words in them.
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morrowasted
Worldwide Stepper



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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19395868 - 01/09/14 08:38 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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I pm'd this to some rando who had sent me a one line greeting last night during my meth-fueled mania
Quote:
On Thu Jan 09 2014 10:55 AM, morrowasted said: heh, well, I'm not going to lie, I don't know how I feel about astrology anymore. I'm about to make a really long reply, but I earnestly hope you will take the time to read through it. Not all at once. Take your time. It's a lot, and I go off into more-than-likely self-absorbed tangents that would get lost on just about anyone but me, but I hope that at the very least you will find it flippantly amusing if disagreeable, or, perhaps you will not find it so disagreeable. I'm not trying to convince you of anything either way, I'm just going to ramble some of my thoughts; in the end I think you will find that the position I take on the issue if someone forces me to take one is fairly simple yet relatively uncommon. The main argumentative point can be summed up as this:
Sign-based interpretation of metaphysical relations such as but not limited to compatibility which is derived from astrological paradigms that were established at some point in the relatively distal past is irredeemably error-prone due to multiple procedural problems that arise during the semantic decoding process:
- Of primary importance, the inaccessibility of the definitions, or any sort of functional equivalent, of pragmatic variables that applied to semantic decoding during sign-based phenomena interpretation at the time of a given astrological system's introduction to the human community, without which present-day procedural application of sign-interpretation cannot truthfully be said to accurately make use of the system in question.
- Of secondary importance, the non-existence in the time at which any given distally introduced systems was introduced into the human community of intentional intra-linguistic semantic web, such as a modern Dictionary, which would at least allow for a better understanding of the modal relationality between the symbols, as apprehended by the minds of those responsible for introducing and originally popularizing a given distally established historical astrological system, without which the accuracy any instance of any sign-based interpretative conclusion such as, for example, but not limited to, compatibility, is obscured to point of non-computability.
- Non-computability essentially means that a computer program could not take input data about your sign, birth location and time, etc., and give you output that is consistent enough to be worthy of attention. Essentially, if the level of semantic obscurity raised to a high enough level, the computer will begin to feed you the same output no matter what input you feed into it. You may be able to design a computer program that works based on an internally-consistent set of semantics of your own device, and that program would function. Such programs probably exist, and the language in them, I am guessing, probably tends to give messages that discuss the the actions of the reader, perhaps sprinkled with slightly-but-not-too-mystical-sounding-allusions-to-things-like-Light-and-Energy, that dazzle the reader with apparent insight about his or her personality and circumstances, but in reality are semantically and syntactically hard-wired to be as universally applicable as possible.
- Despite my serious doubts concerning present-day practical uses for astrological systems which were introduced during portions of the past that are now so distant that we have lost all feasible means of acquiring the variable definitions necessary to execute the proper pragmatic procedures for accurate semantic decoding, I nevertheless maintain that it is possible- in fact, I cannot see how it would NOT be possible- that so-called macrocosmic and microcosmic phenomena could be correlated according to mathematical models. In fact, Richard Tarnas claims to have done precisely that in his book, Cosmos and Psyche. I find his schematic of archetypes to be dubious however, mostly because every time a historical event that is offered up as an example of the conformity between his mathematical models and his classificatory scheme of archetypes, the reader is either forced to accept his decision to classify the given event as such, or else start keeping a list of instances where Tarnas' theory failed to work inside of his own example simply because you fail to agree that one event belongs to a particular category rather than another. His methodology is unquestionably questionable, but if one wishes to question his methodology, one is forced to ask how, other than via the correlation of historical events such a task could be accomplished?
- What I'm left with is a lot of doubts and very little to go on, yet my hope, joy, and contentment grow with each passing day. The idea that keeps invading my thoughts- almost always uninvited; nevertheless exuberantly self-principled and apparently designed (designed?) for action and nothing but action- has to do incorporating the concept of free will into any functional model of my own device that involves human input/output interaction. The faster I run from free will, the more potent its force becomes within me, and changes every preconceived notion I ever held near and dear, and every long-held position that ever gave me comfort, and tears up the pages of my mind more than psychedelics ever did, and hands them back to me in the shape of a single word: "Responsibility". I am no longer a victim of cosmological forces; I am no longer a victim of my genetic predispositions; I am no longer a victim of other peoples' behavior; I am no longer a victim of the apparently negative institutions that I used to feel surrounded by. I am a victim of my own actions. I experience the consequences of my actions. When I live this way, my thoughts become divine. I cannot explain it. I dare not try to any more; every time I have in the past, I've paid for it. I find now that even in the presence or lack thereof of divine answers within any given set of data, interpreted according to some system-astrological, hell, as Einstein occasionally voiced, maybe the divine can be found in the astronomical- I have quite suddenly lost the need to look outside of myself for divine answers.
And believe me, this is just a small portion of what I have to say about this topic. And I can talk about a lot of different topics (not bragging, I just don't get many opportunities and take as many as I can get, so let me know what else you like).
The first problem I run into with it is that almost every person I meet who buys into astrology seems to be using a slightly different system. I am going to focus on the idea of the original Zodiac system, as it existed when it came to be used by humans in what is now called the Far East (whether or not it was created); an idea whose precise form, I hope to demonstrate, has become inaccessible due the simple elements of time and change (progress?).
It seems to me that the main problem with drawing conclusions from Astrological data has to do with the archetypes or "signs". Where did the signs come from? Who decides what their characteristics are? If we assume that the characteristics of a particular sign were defined in a particular language (say, written ancient Chinese) using certain words, and that those words were maintained throughout generations as the components of the sign in question, then our understanding of that sign is sensitive to the way that we translate the Chinese words.
In written Chinese, the meaning of a symbol or symbol-set depends upon its specific shape/form. Shapes/forms are combined in Chinese to create new meanings; for example, to create the written idea of refrigerator the custom has been to combine the symbols for ice and box in serial order the way that we combine letters in English to create words. Thus 冰 (ice) and 箱 (box) become icebox when conjoined, and in the modern age the icebox is the fridge. The determination of sign compatibility according to the Chinese Zodiac originally depended upon this method of symbol conjunction, although lord knows how many different methods are currently being used to supposedly determine the compatibility relation.
For example, if your sign is 羊 (Goat) and the longitude of the Sun is 344 degrees during the Spring, you are presumably interacting with an environment in which the fixed element 木 (wood) is predominant. If you meet someone whose sign is 蛇 (snake), the ancient Chinese attitude involved something like literally taking a brush out and painting 羊地木蛇火 (Goat-Earth-Wood-Snake-Fire) to just "see what it looked like", because in doing so the compatibilities/incompatibilities- the deeper meaning- would sort of just "jump out at you". This attitude is probably related to a learned notion that the symbols were created in such a way that they necessarily posses a "divine" or at very least non-arbitrary connection between the appearance of their precise written form (think about how precise the differentiating parts of the characters are [supposed to be]) and the meaning they produced in one's mind upon observation and reflection. In other words, the ancient Chinese individuals intimately familiar with their written language didn't need someone else to tell them what sign was incompatible with what sign, instead they simply interpreted what was, to them, a "common sense" understanding of the meaning of the symbols, by observing the symbols and the form created out of their conjunction and interspatial-relations. In an attempt to draw a more clear picture of the interpretive process I have been attempting to describe, I now note that it seems to me to be most nearly analogous to the process by which people today are individually able to by virtue of what has come, for better-or-for-worse-but-nothing-if-not-curiously to be referred to with simultaneous connotations of nostalgia and embitterment as - yep - "common sense" arrive at strikingly similar interpretations of metaphorical poetry:
Quote:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference
What is the author talking about, in this poem? Most readers get the impression that the poem is a metaphor about the consequences of choosing to live a relatively unusual type of life. The poem, however, never mentions life. It is about a couple of slightly different roads in a wood, and the fact that the author makes a choice to walk one of them. Without the last line, the general reader will not typically get the impression that the author is talking about life; at best it would seem like a weak metaphor for making atypical decisions, but more likely it would seem like two affirmative statements of fact containing some perhaps poetically-(mal?)inspired grammatical anomalies, but no metaphors. There appears to be some-THING (I rarely use that word, because to me it's like a philosophical mind trap that was literally invented by ancient philosophers for the purpose of making reference to the stuff that you experience with your perceptual faculties and manipulate with your- free will(?)- without talking about certain kinds of stuff. My contention is that they weren't immediately forthright; nobody bothered to say, "by the way, since nobody ever experiences or manipulates stuff that isn't of a specific kind, the stuff we're talking about doesn't exist in real life and was actually just one part of the Sophist tactic of creating generalizations out of specific instances in order to derive propositional contradictions for the sake of winning arguments and gaining prestige and political reputability in the minds of the less-thoughtful [or simply less frightened and selfish?] majority [which unfortunately included those who ruled Greece during the rise of Sophistry] but the truth is, I'm talking about someTHING that I need to refer to, and I don't know what it is because my experiences of it are most like what philosophers call "mental states", and in English we only have specific words for a few mental states that are very non-specific relative to what I am talking about, and mostly affective, like 'happiness', 'anger', 'jealousy', and 'inspiration') residing in the (specifically modern English speaking) cultural-collective- deductive/ inductive/Heuristic/Analogously-Interpretive/Divinely-Inspired(?)/(???)- semantic and pragmatic decoding of this poem, the result of which is the weird-if-you-really-linger-on-it-long-enough,-I-promise reality that most adult English-speaking humans read the poem, and then some message resembling, "This author chose to live an unusual life and seems to be saying that he would've regretted choosing to not do so. " just kind of emerges in their minds.
I think the ancient (and perhaps in many instances also modern, but with different pragmatic assessment results) Chinese interpretation of their Zodiac symbols is like that. It seems that with so few words, each word was probably embedded with a significant amount of semantic content. Here I am going to digress into a bit of sticky linguistic theory, but I will do my best to explain it in words that are easy to understand. Each word being "embedded with a significant amount of semantic content" means that the word has a large variety of possible correct meanings, and that the specific meaning or set of meanings was intentionally determined when it was written, when necessary, by two things. The first and most important is syntactic variability; in other words, the placement of the word in the sentence relative to other words eliminates a range of possible meanings, thus narrowing the possibilities. For example, the word "Bat!" at the beginning of a sentence can only be the verb meaning to hit with a bat, since English requires sentences to contain the elements Subject-Verb-Object, in that order, except in the imperative, or command, form ("Bat!" is a command).
Furthermore, it cannot be the subject or any type of object- which eliminates the possibility of interpreting the word "bat" according to any of its noun-related meanings- because it lacks the necessary indefinite article "a" (which would make it the second word anyway), in addition to the fact that it would lack a verb if it were allowed to be a subject despite lacking the indefinite article, which would result in a sentence fragment. "Bats", on the other hand, could be the first word of a sentence, and, since English does not allow subject elimination in third-person conjugation of the simple present tense (or any tense other than the imperative/command), the word's initial position in the sentence rules out any meanings related to an action, the meaning would have to be one of the nouns. In a textually isolated sentence like, for example, "Bats are cool.", however, we still do not have enough information from the position of the words (the "syntax of the sentence") alone to figure out whether the writer is talking about the little creatures that sort of resemble rats but have scary wings and live in caves, or the huge, sturdy wooden sticks used to hit balls during baseball games. In order to figure out which meaning the writer intended, our only hope is to make a pragmatic assessment of the situation. In this case the best we can do is to say that in our current cultural context, it seems more unlikely that someone would comment on the "coolness" of something as common and simple as a baseball bat and that the writer was thus likely talking about the animals. Based on the fact that flying bats are epically accurate users of echolocation, and that they sleep upside down, and that they inspired Batman to be who he would be if he weren't a fictional character, and that they occasionally turn into vampires, and those guys in baseball are hitting a ball with a big stick and running around in circles, we can definitely conclude that the speaker is a massively disappointing moron who not unlikely "swings from both sides of the plate" (which is yet another expression that I bet anyone on the Shroomery can decode with a simple pragmatic variability assessment, in most cases as a variant of the expression "to swing both ways", the meaning of which is almost universally understood among modern English speaker), if he is in fact he is attempting to express a metaphysical relation between the object, "big sticks used to smack balls as hard as possible" and the non-intrinsic "coolness" property.
The process I have just described of inducing (which means gathering and including as much relevant data as possible to look for patterns) and deducing (which means eliminating as much irrelevant data from the induced set of data as possible, given the circumstantial variables that would induce elimination such as morphosyntactic data and semantic inconsistency) what I will respectfully designate the "most useful" or, as those displaying symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the so-called 'victims' of which I shall proceed to mercilessly yet tactfully bamboozle following the next four oh-so-brief (okay, maybe not so brief) paragraphs (and yes that was my sad, desperate attempt to maintain your attention throughout their entirety, because, hey, uh, it's going to be funny-as-fuck to the extent where you actually might even giggle which is actually a big deal when you're sitting at a computer; just gonna throw out one possible pragmatic assessment of the meaning of "LOL" in 98% of contexts: "I am acknowledging that there either A) was some intention on your part for what you just said to be received in a humorous way or B) was a mildly humorous element in what just occurred, but not enough for me to actually laugh, in which case, I would've said "hahaha". oh ya and also u mite lern sum kewl shit dat u can past in2 a paper 4 skewl hehe. not making fun of you btw) are not infrequently, yet oftentimes and quite impressively managing, without even so much as flinching in reaction to the pain they are surely experiencing from that wholesome benevolent deity Autogenes, in whom I must believe at all costs, lest I impulsively create that divine force for which only he should be responsible; that is to say, the infliction of severe physical unto those intentionally inhuman individuals who insist on perpetually redisplaying the dysfunctional and uncooperative erection of their own image how the world ought to be in their mind (aka their egos), by allowing ridiculous things like, "the ONLY correct working hypotheses" to escape from the orifice on the lower front side of their face- from a given set of input data is often referred to as "common sense." (so yeah that sentence was stupidly long to the point of incomprehensibility unless you read it like ten times, and 98% of the reason it exists is for my own enjoyment, which turns out to be ironic should you manage to sort through it and figure out what the heck it was trying to say). cliffs: it's like there is this computer program in your brain, in which inductive and deductive inference rules work together in a feedback/feedforward loop, to sort through any given set of input data (that I can think of) and then generate the most relevant or useful output possible, depending on the type of input. If the program is trying to generate output in the form of the best meaningful interpretation of symbols you have just focused your attention on, that would be relevant output; whereas if the program is trying to generate output in the form of the most appropriate reaction to a given environmental stimulus, that would be an example of useful output.
The result of the fact that each traditional Chinese pictogram probably had a very large range of possible semantic outputs (the fact that there were so many ways of interpreting what the symbol meant), combined with the reality that ancient Chinese users of the Zodiac lacked the foresight to document these relations and the necessary pragmatic assessment variable definitions, unfortunately, is that we are left with very little guidance concerning the procedure for interpreting the relevant meanings of the symbol in different contexts. This is not at all surprising, since they were probably only minimally if at all aware of the procedure's discernible involvement in the activity of reading (for comprehension). Moreover, before we make the Chinese look like fools who forgot about the future, everyone apparently lacked the foresight to document these types of relations until the first instance of what we would call a genuine Dictionary, with words in a single language making reference to one another in order to create a semantic web of meaningful relationships between them, was published no sooner than 1604. There were bilingual dictionaries prior to this, of course, but the real problem with creating and distributing a modern type dictionary in ancient times was probably related to the reality that, since larger bodies of written material were considered to be intrinsically ephemeral due to the lack of durability of the mediums on which they appeared (which was generally flammable and biodegradable via air moisture), yet expensive at the same time, since each one demanded hand-copying via educated and thus relatively well-paid scribes; moreover, the books were far less practically useful at that time than bilingual dictionaries, which potentiated your ability to interact with foreign trade merchants at a more personable level.
Unfortunately, "common sense" isn't actually universal. It's context-sensitive, in the case of the original Zodiac system it's sensitive to a particular culture at a particular point in its development. The point I'm getting to relates to the fact that in the modern age, it's common to find explanations of the Zodiac signs (often as if it has some sort of functional output, but that's another story...), that look like this (from wikipedia):
Quote:
The relations between those elements are interpolation, interaction, over action, and counter-action, which are believed to be the common law of the motions and changes of the creatures in the universe
You'll note, however, that this particular section of the paper is not cited on wikipedia. That is because there is no ancient Chinese text which contains words like "interpolation". In ancient Ancient Chinese there was a unique pictogram for each idea that was to be represented, so they had to be conservative about the number of ideas they were going to represent (not the mention the fact that writing- especially in China- was still a relatively new, primitive, and rarely-utilized technology).
Instead they had pictograms/symbols for things that were relevant parts of their experience; things they needed to make reference to; hence, wood, fire, snake, ox, goat, earth, etc. ('yin' and 'yang' are highly notable exceptions because of their highly abstract meaning, but in written Chinese they had very few contenders until they were joined by invading Messianic-era abstractions, including but not limited to the etymological relatives and descendants of 'Tao'). There was almost certainly no pictogram in ancient Chinese for the action we call "interpolation", since it is the kind of action that has only become commonplace (enough to elicit a neologism, or new word) in the context of very high rates of literacy, and more important high-level argumentation about knowledge and/or opinions gathered by interlocutors from a chosen item of text. What this means is that the writer of this document is making his own assessment of what was taking place when the ancient Chinese were engaged in thinking about the interaction between Zodiac signs, and asserting that the Chinese elemental system inherently implies 'interpolatory' action.
The truth, I believe, is that the kind of interaction that takes place between the elements, in the minds of the creators of the Zodiac system of signs, has to do with the combination of symbols and thus the morphology (transformation of pieces of word units to alter their meaning, ie hating v. hated, syntax (word order), semantics (meaning of the words given their relation to one another in the sentence), and most importantly the pragmatics (the meaning of words given their relation to the environmental context in which they are used) of traditional written Chinese itself. Pragmatic assessment of the written Chinese that existed when the Zodiac system came about is utterly inaccessible due, as we have previously stated, to time and change. Even if you ask a modern Chinese person, the pragmatic assessment you will receive is composed of the the meaning of the word within the context of modern written Chinese, even if it is traditional. A simple example of changing pragmatics is, excuse my language, the word nigger. It is no longer acceptable to write or say this word in almost any context except perhaps one such as this, but even 60 years ago it was perfectly acceptable in many parts of the USA to write this word in a paper and turn it in to your teacher for a grade.
You'll also find things surrounding astrology such as this (from wikipedia):
Quote:
Ox - Narcissistic personality disorder, Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, Schizoid personality disorder
These personality disorders- the first two, anyway, which I will focus on- are almost certainly context-dependent. In a hunter-gatherer society, there is no time for narcissism or compulsive behavior that serves no useful purpose. Any individuals who may begin to exhibit such narcissistic or useless compulsive behaviors in such a society would be promptly made aware that continued instances of such behavior would result in decisively negative consequences, or simply disposed of immediately. Narcissistic personalities exists in the present age- in perpetuity- in such large numbers that, when exhibited to a certain degree, it has been classified as a pathological disorder. Why is this the case? Because we have created and/or become inadvertently involved in a situation which demands that certain individuals maintain narcissistic attitudes as defense mechanisms. Many individuals feel lost in the shuffle.
In ancient China, a human was 1 in maybe 500,000,000, but a human didn't even think about numbers like that; he felt like 1 in 5,000 at most. Today, just the knowledge that a human is 1 in 7 billion is hard to fathom- but being in a big city makes the feeling of insignificance multiply, and the celebrity "circus maximus" (which is, ironically, composed of people who are selected and then groomed into a variety of personalities and appearances and roles, just right, by the truly significant people, who you never see and have probably never heard of- because they like it that way- to give the impression that you, too, no matter how insignificant, can one day rise above the masses and at least be on the other side of the screen) makes it exponentially worse because it quite often forces you to realize that not only are you so insignificant that when you die you'll be forgotten in two generations at most, but that there is this other group of people who seem to be really significant whose achievements will carry on post-mortem, sometimes for millenia- and you're not part of that group.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a reactive rejection of the feeling that one person is an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, a reaction that could only exist in the context of a huge community in which certain individuals have to capacity to broadcast whatever they wish on a massive scale with the (well-grounded) expectation of a massive, mixed, and usually non-determinate audience, while others can only broadcast most (but not all) of what they wish to relatively small, homogeneous, and often predetermined audiences. Similarly, the existence of obsessive-compulsive disorder is sensitive to the context in which its existence was postulated. It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that there have always been individuals who mentally obsess about the particularity of performing a certain sequence of actions, but until modern times, individuals who obsessed about particularity in such a way that their obsession interfered with the solidarity of group action would (in a more sympathetic tribe) simply be given an ultimatum that would immediately and (quite interestingly,) perpetually interrupt their obsession before it became a compulsive behavior, or be exiled (or worse). The mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder are probably more complicated than those undergirding Narcissistic personality disorder, because of the relevant research on the environment/predisposition interaction involved in its initial development.
Needless to say, it isn't likely that individuals with the sign of Ox suffered from Narcissistic personality disorder in ancient China. This is something that modern Americans who are familiar with abnormal human psychology have superimposed on the interpretative schematic based on their understanding of the characteristics that are associated with each sign. So, whoever decided to write that Ox-signs are more likely to have NPD did all of the following:
- Assumed prior to beginning that it's actually possible to fully understand and use the Zodiac system without using or even having any understanding of the language in which it came about.
- Read and memorized modern and very arguably less-than-perfect English translations of traditional Chinese pictograms, whose precise connotative meaning is difficult to determine outside of the cultural and historical context in which the Zodiac system was devised (at that point in history dictionaries did not exist, so we cannot refer back to a dictionary which existed at that time in order to determine the then-most popularly accepted semantic content of a particular symbol).
- Read one or more modern English guides concerning the practical application of Zodiac-based knowledge or understanding, derived from the use of various information input values arranged in accordance with the Zodiac system template. Assumed that these guides were not only in systematic agreement with one another but also that they had correctly re-instituted the precise practice/science/art of achieving knowledge/understanding via interpretation of data fed through the Zodiac system, or else only read one guide and assumed the same of it.
- Intentionally categorized characteristics that are grouped within a particular sign on the basis of the diagnostic criteria that can be found among the most broadly-defined personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Stastistical Manual (like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. If you read the behavioral diagnosis criteria in the DSM, you will almost certainly say, "Hey, I do that sometimes, so does that mean I have the disorder?" The short answer is, only if you do it so much that you can't function in a cooperative manner).
- Wrote something on the internet that has probably been read by at least a few thousand people that essentially means this is probably what was going through her head when she wrote it: "Well, the Chinese sign for Ox has more attributes that translate to words that are sort of synonymous with self-centered in English than most of the other signs, and people love to have catch-phrases that they can use as excuses for maladjusted behavior, so now not only can maladjusted narcissists blame their maladjusted behavior on a "Disorder" (it's been diagnosed!!), they can also point out that this was all predetermined by the fates, (nearly all oxes born between 11am and 3pm have personality disorders!!)
Now, if you're still reading, I earnestly commend and thank you, you've done more for me than most people on the planet can say they have done, and that's the true truth. Most people would've never started reading when they saw the size of the scrollbar, because they would rather watch something, because it's easier. But is it really a better use of your time? No further aimless apologetic digressions: I've kept you too long already.
You might be thinking, but what about Western astrology? The predominant set of modern "systems" that originally surfaced among so-called Western civilizations, all of which are essentially homologous, has its own set of historically different yet characteristically familiar problems, in light of those we have just discussed (at great length, for which I must apologize). If you are interested in understanding the specifics of those problems, I would be happy to detail them for you, but you were probably burned out on the specificity of my atypical word choice and absurdly excessive length of my sentences before finishing the second paragraph, as any reasonable person ought to be. I gave up on being reasonable. For better or for worse.
needless to say the dude/dudette was not pleased. this was his/her reply:
Quote:
I read it but I can't say I really got anything out of it.
I understand you're intelligent and all but could you please dumb your words down next time you write me something? because I didn't understand about half of that.
i always have a tendency to wax exceedingly verbose on amphetamines, to the point in the past where I started using words I had basically never used before and didn't even work in the sentence. in this case the words themselves were all used according to their actual definitions, only new problem is.... goddamn do i have a horrible tendency with attempted-humor tangents and taking any and every opportunity to digress from the topic at hand into discussion of a topic that actually interests me 
remind me to never ever ever write a paper for school on amphetamines. i dont know how i used to do it. i guess cuz I was in philosophy lol
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morrowasted
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: FrozenHappiness]
#19395880 - 01/09/14 08:43 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
FrozenHappiness said:
 Sometimes those very words you detest strongly dislike so much are the most appropriate ones to use. If these words are used correctly they can make sentances more consice not have as many words in them.
yeah way to reiterate the central thesis of my original post in a much less entertaining and inspired way bro
major props are well deserved all around, actually. so far nobody seems to have noticed that the entire middle portion of the OP is an extended discussion on the specific benefits of choosing to use more refined or field-specific terminology
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FrozenHappiness
Professional Cereal Box

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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted] 1
#19395952 - 01/09/14 09:02 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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tl;dr 
speed on, good sir
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Hellogoodbyedeath

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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396047 - 01/09/14 09:23 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
morrowasted said: yeah way to reiterate the central thesis of my original post in a much less entertaining and inspired way bro
major props are well deserved all around, actually. so far nobody seems to have noticed that the entire middle portion of the OP is an extended discussion on the specific benefits of choosing to use more refined or field-specific terminology
You got me. I should have read! I guess sometimes, I just see a large body of text, read the first few and last sentences to get a good summary of what was being discussed, and call it a day.
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MorphinTime
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396152 - 01/09/14 09:57 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Well that was fun
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thelanzii

Registered: 11/13/12
Posts: 5,434
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: MorphinTime]
#19396185 - 01/09/14 10:07 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Sometimes using higher levels of diction is appropriate, Such as in a business setting or attempting to impress another individual. Using big words in a casual setting is somewhat unnecessary, but depends on the situation.
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stzacrack
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396247 - 01/09/14 10:22 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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For having such a finite understanding of astrology I can understand your skepticism.
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FrozenHappiness
Professional Cereal Box

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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: stzacrack]
#19396308 - 01/09/14 10:36 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Also, the food here is fucking terrible, but the portion sizes are really small
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morrowasted
Worldwide Stepper



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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: MorphinTime]
#19396333 - 01/09/14 10:43 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
MorphinTime said: Well that was fun 
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Repertoire89
Cat



Registered: 11/15/12
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396336 - 01/09/14 10:43 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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birdland

Registered: 07/24/11
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396618 - 01/09/14 11:47 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
morrowasted said: lol based on replies it seems to me that that nobody who has posted thus far actually read the OP
either that it turned out more incomprehensible than I intended 
Yup, definitely a tldr. I read the first few paragraphs and then replied
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KingKnowledge
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: birdland]
#19396635 - 01/09/14 11:50 PM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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...so how's that meth morrow?
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r00tuuu123
Now I'm just really piseed



Registered: 04/20/12
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19396875 - 01/10/14 12:45 AM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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Quote:
morrowasted said: do u like it when words become letters? i do. it makes a lot of sense from a phonological standpoint, and that's the last time this post will make any discernible amount of coherent sense. u no wat i hate tho? needlessly big words like "phonological", "discernible", and "coherent". who does that shit? fuckin hipsters. a big word is like a song title that's 10 words words long or a band name with symbols in it. nobody is gonna remember that shit, jackass, just speak like the rest of us self-respecting, honest, people and stop acting like u got something to prove.
do u like cars? if not well too bad, so sad, señor fuck-o the first, cuz coming rapidly (that means rly fast) your way is an extra-juicy car metaphor that I hope will succeed in showing you why those big, mean, ugly words that people who don't mind being known as true-grit heavyweight 'intellectuals' shot-put at one another as if they were ego-powered, shot-put-shaped-ninja-stars, (in a brutal[ly boring] competition of legendar[il]y [pitiful] proportions that can only end, of course, when one intellectual uses a word for which the other intellectual can't recite Webster's definition without the use of an iPhone*) are sometimes actually kind of just a wee bit interesting if you like, think about it and shit, or, if not that, then, you know, at the very least, they actually turn out to be ever-so-slightly (aka quite) useful when used the really really specific kinds of conversations that they were created to be used in.**
YOUR extra-juicy metaphor, which, for your convenience, I have allowed to be ruthlessly brutalized by Google's "English->Dumbese" translation software, here and now to be served up fresh and ONLY FOR YOU, THE READER, on an unquestionably appetizing list-shaped silver (or blue, whatever, fuck off) platter:
big, fancy & relatively new words- like, for example, the word "neologism"- much like big, fancy, new cars, very often come with "fully-loaded" with super awesome features such as but not necessarily limited to:
- a relative shitload of interior space (at least compared to old, outdated clusters of small words like "new" and "word"). Very often this space even comes fully lock, stocked, and loaded with a bunch of shit you actually can actually use. Rearrangement of your brand-new useable shit is often much easier to accomplish than it was with your old car! There will always be enough interior room left over so you can put a little more shit in there if you need to, but you might need to move some parts, which brings us to.....
- parts that move in a way that is actually useful because it results in shorter sentences whose meaning is less likely to get lost in the massive and often downright ugly clustering of the old word phrases that would be required to achieve the same effect. for example, the terminologically-dense sentence, "Recursively generated outputs are defined by their subsequent neologistically-determined categorical differentiation." would have to be written in "old/small/dumb words" as something like, "the words my program creates are divided into overlapping categories in a way that you can think of as working like a venn diagram, according to the order of their letters, the ancestral word precedents that inspired their creation, and what they mean, in a sort of process that 'loops back' on itself every time it finishes in a unique way that is the same in the sense that the computer program code but different in the sense that the information being processed through it has changed since the last time it ran, by using the information that was gathered during the just-finished word-sorting process in order to create a completely new word which shares none of the variations of any of the three kinds of properties of a word I made reference to earlier in this sentence in common with any of the words that the program has already created," (breathe), if you wanted to express the same exact idea to someone who has no familiarity with the potentially applicable terminology.
- sex appeal!!! drop a big word at the right moment and dumb skanks will not infrequently make the false assumption you are some type of scientist or doctor or computer nerd (or whatever cuz let's be honest she doesnt really give a shit what you do for a living, her interest has been piqued by the fact that she has just located a potential opportunity to do you for a living).
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE! KIND OF. NOT REALLY. ACTUALLY I DUNNO IF IT COUNTS AS MORE OR NOT. I WILL NOW TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO EXTOL WHAT I CONSIDER TO BE THE GREATEST VIRTUE OF THE MASTERPIECE WHICH HAS JUST BLESSED YOUR LIFE WITH ITS PRESENCE.
Certainly by now you have already realized that you have just encountered a masterpiece of metaphor- you know the type. Metaphorical crafting of this caliber has been known to shock poets into their first genuine existential crisis, in response to which they are not infrequently found driving in cars and wearing shoes that cover the entire foot. Alas, my friends: the fuckedness of your mind is about to increase by many orders of magnitude.
You have, in fact, and without realizing it (since you are undoubtedly a neophyte of neologism at best and, quite honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of you were to lose in the previously described intellectual battle-royale against Hodor himself) just read and perhaps even managed, thanks to my gracious willingness to translate it into Dumbese, to partially understand a metaphor which exemplifies respectable usage of a new word using a word which itself means "newly created words, often created for use in specific contexts."

Ur damn right u gatdamned hooligans.

ACUALY THEIR IS MOAR! just a bit tho
moral of the story: dictionaries are heavy and thus make highly effective (and more importantly ironic but i don't think god himself could explain the meaning that intellectual douchebags intend when they use the word irony) weapons for heaving at great velocities (that means rly fast) in the general direction of anyone you see who appears to get his jollies doing anything that involves books or schools unless it also involves fire.
*(The winner of the intellectual battle-royale celebrates his win- alone, to be sure- by basking in the sublime & radiant glory of his intellectual..ness, having temporarily squashed his insecurities into the shadows with the unquestionably empowering self-assurance which has of course resulted from his superior demonstration of that oh-so-vital skill where you use the most obscure word possible inside of a context that is specifically counter-productive to using that word. this skill so incredibly vital that humans, of course, long ago crafted a word for it... oh wait. my point is obv. that all intellectuals are ego-driven douchebags who are continually in need of gentle reminders of that fact in the form of a severe ass-beating).
**You may have overheard this type of conversation taking place between small groups of overweight neckbeards whose complexion would demand SPF60 in the unlikely event that their skin were ever to come into contact with sunlight.
 MISTER T SAYS: I pity the fool who whittles his life away reading a hundred posts that say shit like "LOL" and replying to this thread with TL;DR
Somebody got a Roget's for Chritmass. sorry but I cant afford all the 50 cent words, so I'll just buy ya a beer. Now STFU AND RTFM Now Settle down there sparky!
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Please report me to a Mod for hurting your punk ass hippie feelings And all time Champion thread killer.
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morrowasted
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: r00tuuu123]
#19397562 - 01/10/14 06:57 AM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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more like i got a free bag of meth a couple days ago lol
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Bassfreak
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19397597 - 01/10/14 07:07 AM (10 years, 21 days ago) |
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i remember at my high school graduation the validvictorian (sp??) was this kid who didnt have many friends and was kinda weird. well he got to do a speech in front of all of us and our families and he tried so fuckin hard to sound smart. like he used way too many big words and he did it so much taht nobody understood what he was trying to say, even the adults
a lot of people kinda started laughing and were looking around like "wtf is he saying?"...if anything he deserved to be laughed at for desperately trying so hard to sound smarter and better than pretty much everyone at the graduation
-------------------- Tom Brady is a God Free Tom Brady
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Bodhi of Ankou
*alternate opinion blocks path*


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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: morrowasted]
#19398070 - 01/10/14 09:39 AM (10 years, 20 days ago) |
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Goddamn, that zodiac post was nordering incomprehensible even with a dictionary. I gave up after the second paragraph
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morrowasted
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Re: Why big words and those that use them suck: a superfluous, self-indulgent, incoherent diatribe [Re: Bodhi of Ankou]
#19400054 - 01/10/14 04:34 PM (10 years, 20 days ago) |
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Quote:
Bodhi of Ankou said: Goddamn, that zodiac post was nordering incomprehensible even with a dictionary. I gave up after the second paragraph 
The ideas in it actually make a lot of sense they're just very poorly organized and require a lot of background in linguistics
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