I’ve known a lot of people who used obscure words properly butpronounced them wrong. I gently corrected them. Sometimes, they were embarrassed. But to me, there’s no shame in that — it means that they used and understood words no one used around them. That’s a mark of being well-read. But they only used those words aloud among friends — better to know the pronunciations before you bust them out in a meeting. Online dictionaries are great for that.
These lists are always arbitrary, and this one is no exception. It’s a nice mix, though — words like nanotechnology and polymer are ones any citizen needs to know to keep up with technology and its moral and ethical issues. Some of the words are worth knowing just because they bring more flavor and poetry to language; “lugubrious” is much more evocative than “bummed out,” and “obsequious” is much richer than “brown-nosed,” though they’re synonyms.
To me, lists like this have value beyond the specific words chosen. It’s like when the American Film Institute ranks movies (or movie quotes, movie songs, etc.). People discuss and debate rich words and old movies. They talk about them. They care about them. The list as a monolith is far less important than its function in sparking discussion.
Because a lot of my interests are in science, history and politics, there are some words I would put on the list: truth, fact, theory, hypothesis, and how they differ; correlation and causation, and how they differ; manumission, evident, apparent, rebuttable, presumptive, and I’ll probably think of some others.
Just fake an accent; veg ah taables...
Some excellent points. There are many words that should be added to this list. I would also remove a few of them.
When reading, I will write down a word that I don’t understand and then look it up.
Today I was reading John Wyndham’s book, “The Day Of The Triffids”. Great book, btw, especially if you like science fiction as I do. I had seen the movie years ago but had never read the book.
Any way, he had this short line “My next morning was desultory”. Absolutely no way to derive the meaning from that sentence.
From the internet: Definition of desultory.
1. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
2. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.