6 ms·
Have never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their pe
by EasyTiger_ 6y ago
Have never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their peers?
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoKnowing developers who choose to write above an 8th grade reading level for no reason... they used that word to feel superior and make everyone who reads it feel stupid.
- iokevins 6y agoAlliteration. They wrote "paragon of pulchritude", which to me sounds like smart, dry humor. It works.
- bredren 6y agoYes, I’d also guess the dev was not a Latin scholar and that this assembly required a thesaurus.
- devnonymous 6y agoPrecisely. The phrase is pretty popular in prose, particularly when prefixed with 'perfect'.
- leephillips 6y agoIt could just be that the developer’s native language happens to be English, reads books, and he/she used a familiar word without thinking twice about it. Because this is, in fact, a fairly common word.
- grumple 6y agoI’ve read at least several hundred books in English, and probably hundreds of thousands of news stories and blog posts, and don’t recall encountering it before. It seems to appear mostly in searches for its definition and gre prep...
- leephillips 6y agoTry, say, Google ngram. Would you say that, for example, “disharmonious” is a rare word? Graph them together. Pulchritude is not even moderately rare.
- grumple 6y agoI’m not sure what you’re trying to say here; pulchritude twice as rare as disharmonious, which is relatively rare. It’s an order of magnitude rarer than effervescent, as an example, which is a word I would consider uncommon but in most people’s vocabularies. And given how much more common pulchritude is - surely physical beauty is one of the most common subjects in any language - while disharmony and effervescence are more complex and rarer in practice, I think it speaks to how little the word is used. Its synonym, beauty, is used 2000x as often.
- leephillips 6y agoExcept that pulchritude beats disharmonious for over a hundred years. And even now, it’s half as common as disharmonious, which is a commonplace word. But if you think that a word like “disharmonious” is in any sense rare, then I don’t think I can convince you with data.
- 6y ago