Buckley
Well-Known Member
Someone's response to a poster on another website who claimed that people using 'big words' were just showing off:
OK, so you're posting a tendentious thread on the sesquipedalian tendencies of others, which you surmise to be mere self-aggrandisement on their part? And, in doing so, surmising further that such tendencies are actuated in toto, as it were, by a desire to, as you put it, "try to be clever", and which I might have - with perhaps somewhat more prolixity - described as "essaying a modicum of intellectual adroitness"?
I wonder, though, on what grounds you prejudice such an unequivocal assertion? Do you not think that, perhaps, someone possessing the ability to correctly capitalise on an extensive lexicon may have less to prove than you might, and that, in the projection of your own weltanschauung onto the intellectual processes of others, you may be also ascribing to their actions the motives which you yourself might exhibit in the event of your possession of such a capability yourself?
It is, I feel, incumbent on me to defend those who relish the fluent deployment of this language and its cornucopia of expressiveness and vocabulary in the face of your animadversion towards us - forsooth, were no-one to serve as a bulwark to them in such an exigency, it would be inevitable that the tyranny of the mediocre had gained a further few precious inches, and that the domain of those possessing the ability to scriven with celerity be diminished as a result.
Prolix sesquipedalians, arise! And strike a polysyllabic blow for your condign privilege to indite as you would, untrammelled by the strictures of those too pusillanimous and timorous to augment the canon of their verbiage, and determined to constrain ours likewise!
OK, so you're posting a tendentious thread on the sesquipedalian tendencies of others, which you surmise to be mere self-aggrandisement on their part? And, in doing so, surmising further that such tendencies are actuated in toto, as it were, by a desire to, as you put it, "try to be clever", and which I might have - with perhaps somewhat more prolixity - described as "essaying a modicum of intellectual adroitness"?
I wonder, though, on what grounds you prejudice such an unequivocal assertion? Do you not think that, perhaps, someone possessing the ability to correctly capitalise on an extensive lexicon may have less to prove than you might, and that, in the projection of your own weltanschauung onto the intellectual processes of others, you may be also ascribing to their actions the motives which you yourself might exhibit in the event of your possession of such a capability yourself?
It is, I feel, incumbent on me to defend those who relish the fluent deployment of this language and its cornucopia of expressiveness and vocabulary in the face of your animadversion towards us - forsooth, were no-one to serve as a bulwark to them in such an exigency, it would be inevitable that the tyranny of the mediocre had gained a further few precious inches, and that the domain of those possessing the ability to scriven with celerity be diminished as a result.
Prolix sesquipedalians, arise! And strike a polysyllabic blow for your condign privilege to indite as you would, untrammelled by the strictures of those too pusillanimous and timorous to augment the canon of their verbiage, and determined to constrain ours likewise!
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