6 ms·

Trigger warning: shameless (but pertinent) brag coming up. In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as

Trigger warning: shameless (but pertinent) brag coming up. In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as well as a fan of wordplay so I wrote an essay describing the life and work of an obscure 19th-century philosopher, who also happened to be completely fictional. Since I could just pull the "facts" out of my ass, it was easy to write. A week later I was called in by the English department and had a sit down with two grim looking teachers. They confronted me with suspicions of plagiarism. Most of their case was built on my use of the word "gamut", which they thought a 19-year-old non-native speaker was not supposed to know. I was incensed (as well as flattered), but they only relented after I pointed out that the essay was an acrostic. The first letters of the paragraphs spelled the word "humbug".

jokowueu 4y ago
Haha . What was their reaction ?!
- kieckerjan 4y ago
  I made the grade.
carlob 4y ago
This is something most people who have never learnt a foreign language don't get, but usually the fancier the word sounds, the more likely it comes straight from Greek or Latin and to be pretty much the same in your native language. For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.
- noneeeed 4y ago
  Also, I've found that many non-english speakers learn a lot of their vocabulary from written sources, and so use "fancier" words than many of us native speakers would. It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter. I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    English has a vast vocabulary of words and phraseology that most native speakers would never or rarely use in everyday speech--and mostly wouldn't in non-literary writing (and even then). Get into the really less common words and even very literate English speakers probably don't know and would certainly never use a fairly large swath of English vocabulary (e.g. the words in Merriam-Webster or the OED). And that's not even getting into slang which is often specific to subcultures or a particular age group.
    - enkid 4y ago
      Is that different from any other language?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's hard to say because of things like technical words and slang that isn't in an official dictionary but the Wikipedia article [1] suggests that English is on the high side. (The Wictionary reference for English is a bit higher than the number or words in either MW or OED.) One thing that probably drives word count in English is it has many cases where there are multiple words with similar meanings derived from French/Latin and German-like respectively. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
      - DFHippie 4y ago
        It is easier to adopt words into English because English has so few inflections. If it's a noun, you need to be able to add an -s to the end. If it's a verb, you need to add -s, -ed, and -ing. And because the spelling is so random you don't need to make any other changes: just throw it in there. People will probably pronounce it wrong until it becomes widely adopted, like lieutenant, at which point however they're pronouncing it is the correct pronunciation in English (and it may, like lieutenant, have different correct pronunciations in different dialects). I suspect this contributes to the size of the English lexicon.
- baisq 4y ago
  It’s happened to me with puerile (childish) and many others.

jokowueu 4y ago

Haha . What was their reaction ?!

kieckerjan 4y ago
I made the grade.

carlob 4y ago

This is something most people who have never learnt a foreign language don't get, but usually the fancier the word sounds, the more likely it comes straight from Greek or Latin and to be pretty much the same in your native language. For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.

noneeeed 4y ago
Also, I've found that many non-english speakers learn a lot of their vocabulary from written sources, and so use "fancier" words than many of us native speakers would. It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter. I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.
- ghaff 4y ago
  English has a vast vocabulary of words and phraseology that most native speakers would never or rarely use in everyday speech--and mostly wouldn't in non-literary writing (and even then). Get into the really less common words and even very literate English speakers probably don't know and would certainly never use a fairly large swath of English vocabulary (e.g. the words in Merriam-Webster or the OED). And that's not even getting into slang which is often specific to subcultures or a particular age group.
  - enkid 4y ago
    Is that different from any other language?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's hard to say because of things like technical words and slang that isn't in an official dictionary but the Wikipedia article [1] suggests that English is on the high side. (The Wictionary reference for English is a bit higher than the number or words in either MW or OED.) One thing that probably drives word count in English is it has many cases where there are multiple words with similar meanings derived from French/Latin and German-like respectively. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      It is easier to adopt words into English because English has so few inflections. If it's a noun, you need to be able to add an -s to the end. If it's a verb, you need to add -s, -ed, and -ing. And because the spelling is so random you don't need to make any other changes: just throw it in there. People will probably pronounce it wrong until it becomes widely adopted, like lieutenant, at which point however they're pronouncing it is the correct pronunciation in English (and it may, like lieutenant, have different correct pronunciations in different dialects). I suspect this contributes to the size of the English lexicon.
baisq 4y ago
It’s happened to me with puerile (childish) and many others.