I think maybe he rolled his own…
I have the same question about this editor as I had about Randall’s Thing Explainer – what’s the source of the list? (Because, as noted in the linked comment, these lists vary widely.)
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It may be a good thing for writing words for young people.
It is not needed if you are writing words for older people.
One need not fancy words when one has them! This editor would actually cause me to fancy more words.
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One of my favorite ever Doctor Who stories is “…Ish”, an audio story produced by Big Finish some years ago. It involves the Doctor attending a lexicography convention to meet an old friend, who is apparently murdered by the sentient dictionary she was developing. It is a clever story with lots of fun wordplay. The trailer hardly does it justice.
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Nobody in the hate mail or these comments has mentioned the main use, which to me would be seeing if you can explain things simply yourself. You don’t have to use those words with other people, but you’ll discover if you are using big words to skip over things you don’t actually understand completely.
“Plants work by photosynthesis!” versus actually having to explain what that means simply, for example.
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Oh, I don’t know; when i first started in college, I still had a copy of Grammatik III. The thing I used to do on English papers was this: I would run it through to check for grammar errors, then I would keep revising until the software told me I was writing at a 5th-grade reading level. It worked; every paper I ran through the software was an A paper.
IIRC Grammatik was snatched up by WordPerfect.
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That makes quite a bit sense, actually. Kudos for finding a use, although I have to admit that I never heard of Grammatik (of any version) until now.
I started becoming computer literate when Word Perfect was the standard.
And I guess I could have clarified:
Such an app is useless for me, personally.
*lolz
Aside from my penchant for using gifs and memes to demonstrate many of my views when online, I’m naturally loquacious both in person and when I write compositions.
Furthermore, I enjoy using my ‘$20 vocab words’ correctly in my everyday vernacular; it makes me feel like I actually got something worthwhile out of college, and not just a ton of debt.
Go figure.
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I’d love to run an S.J. Perelman essay through this. Then again most of the fun of reading Perelman comes from how often his abstruseness shades to crystalline given the surrounding ambience.
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I am reminded of Basic English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
Now I’m wondering whether trump speak is the new new speak.
I was thinking this should be called Word Goer Five.
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[quote=“Boundegar, post:18, topic:76243”]Those who possess intelligence, which you surely must understand, would undoubtedly compose inscrutably obtuse, interminable run-on split-pea split-infinitive sentences with loads of massively verbose wordforms internationalization dangling participle.
[/quote]
I used a thesaurus!
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Up to 4? Too complex!
I can do just fine with only 0 and 1
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Sarcasm aside, there is nothing ungrammatical about split infinitives in English. They’re just easily abused. The same goes prepositions at the ends of sentences. Next time someone complains about those, forget the apocryphal Churchill quote and just ask how they’d rewrite the imperative sentence “Move on.”
I do have a tendency to overuse big words in conversation (albeit correctly) without realizing it sometimes, but this is balanced by my making a complete idiot of myself other times by saying something that makes no sense at all because I didn’t think it through. I’ve also read too much fantasy in my life, and sometimes accidentally use archaic word forms.
This would actually be a really useful tool for me at work if I could edit the list to add any necessary jargon term I was able to define using the base list and pre-existing jargon, although at the end I might still copy and paste it to a less restrictive interface for editing and add other words when it really matters. A lot of what I do involves explaining things to non-technical, non-native-English-speaking audiences.
Side-note: As awesome and brilliant and useful as Thing Explainer is, I think geology and rocket science and anatomy are actually the easy fields of science for that kind of project because the items and ideas in question are at least a little bit familiar to most readers; we’ve encountered them at some point in some form in real life. I wonder if you could do the same with cell biology or abstract math.
Cell bio is hard for me because I have terrible recall and will never, ever remember the difference between, say, MAP kinase, MAP-kinase-kinase, MAP kinase-kinase-kinase, and MAP kinase-kinase-kinase-kinase. I forget where I saw this suggestion first, but someone once commented on how much easier it is to remember things like the geneological trees in fantasy stories than cell bio, and maybe that would provide a way to improve the situation.
I am pretty comfortable with math up through abstract algebra, set theory, and group theory, but at some point in trying to understand and explore the pure underlying structure of ideas, everything is defined in terms of everything else and I have no idea where to begin. And unfortunately the smartest mathematician I personally know is an intellectual sadist and a terrible explainer.
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run-on split-pea split-infinitive sentences …
Sorry, I’ve been operating under the assumption that hyphenations make me seem erudite.
Because clear communication is always a dumb idea.
So much preferable to deploy an assiduously accumulated lexicon of ingenious esoteric phrases in a quixotic quest for terminal terminological interpersonal transmissions rending one’s content unaccountably unfathomable.
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No. Trumpspeak is the nunu speak.
Words. What are they good for? Nothing!
I will say it another time.
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