Words you never use?

Gorbles said:
I swear chefs are possibly the most volatile speakers outside of the infamous dock workers stereotype .
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I’m neither a chef nor dockworker but my spoken language can be pretty colorful! :lol:

For some reason though I don’t like writing it online. If I had to take a crack at it, I guess that it comes across differently written than it does spoken.

I’m not trying to get around any filters :shifty: but there’s also a word that starts with a “D” and rhymes with woosh. I don’t like that either.
 
amadeus said:
“Bespoke.”

Something about it just irritates me. I can’t explain it well.
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I somehow connect it to "bewitched", and then it seriously doesn't make any sense to me.

amadeus said:
It’s not for me, really. I’ll give another example of my own life: utilize.
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I write scientific jargon, so I've written this a ton of times. Probably never said it in RL though.



When I was younger, I never said "cool", but rather "wicked" (well, the German version of it, "geil").
No clue why.


I should have a few more examples, but I really can't remember :think:.
 
I avoid using words that groups of people are especially offended by, even if they use those words themselves. The N-word is the obvious example. I also wouldn't call a gay man a [cigarette] or a woman a [tart] even though I've heard gay men and women call each other that, in a tongue-in-cheek teasing way. Heck, I've heard gay women call themselves a [levee], but I just choose not to go there myself.

I never used "******" as a noun, because I grew up in a neighborhood where the local goons used it a lot (put a Boston accent on it: "Ree-tahd"). I also never used very much of the stereotypical New England language - "wicked" *; "packie" ** - because the stereotype aggravated me. I say soda rather than tonic and sub (as in, submarine sandwich) rather than grinder, but if I heard someone in a shop say "I'll take a tonic with that grindah", I would know what they're saying.

* "Wicked" meant "very" or "extremely."
** In New England, "packie" is short for "package store", an antiquated term for a liquor store. I don't know if anybody called it a package store past WWII, but "packie" stuck in the lexicon until maybe the 1990s.
 
I dropped the words [cigarette] and gay (as in, that's so gay) from my vocabulary. Both of those words almost always meant asshat and lame, respectively, and not homosexual. It took a while though because it was slang I grew up with and I had to come to grips that no matter how I used the words, they were hurtful and derogatory.



Chesterfield means couch in Canadian and in the process of figuring that out, I was outed for liking a Nickelback song and I've never come back from that.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I dropped the words [cigarette] and gay (as in, that's so gay) from my vocabulary. Both of those words almost always meant asshat and lame, respectively, and not homosexual. It took a while though because it was slang I grew up with and I had to come to grips that no matter how I used the words, they were hurtful and derogatory.
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same. it's screwed up, but difficult to stop.
 
I don’t use the word “bemused” because it means confused and not amused but I don’t like explaining that.
 
amadeus said:
It’s not for me, really. I’ll give another example of my own life: utilize.

It means the same thing as “use.”

I will fight anybody on this topic.
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"Utilize" should have slightly different connotations than "use." It should be saved for cases where something is used in an unusual, practical, or particularly beneficial way. Hence it's producing the extra utility connoted by "utilize." For example, "I utilized the laser pointer from my presentation as a cat toy". You certainly could just say "I used" instead and it wouldn't change the sentence much, but I'd say "utilized" is appropriate in this case.

People do tend to treat "utilize" as just a fancy version of "use". In that case, it makes the sentence needlessly verbose and pretentious.
 
I desperately try and avoid creating acronyms when naming new products or services I'm working on. It's usually a losing battle though because more often than not someone [usually a boss] will try and backronym whatever name I came up with or otherwise order me to change it to an acronym. I'm currently fighting my boss on this right now as I came up with an awesome product name that riffs off our company name and he wants me to backronym it.
 
Elon Musk's ASS email:
Acronyms Seriously Suck:

There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.

That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.

For example, there should be not "HTS" [horizontal test stand] or "VTS" [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A "stand" at our test site is obviously a test stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with "Tripod", which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!

The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, e.g. MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
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I almost never use "ignorant" or "literally" in the way they've come to be used the last 10-20 years. I still use "literally" according to its dictionary definition, but I've basically dropped "ignorant" from everyday speech.
 
N word and cigarette were never really used here much anyway.

First one in a children's rhyme in the 80s (eeny meeny miney moe).

Cigarette word early 90s high school. You don't really hear it any more except maybe in old school jokes at port. Usually used to deliberately offend.

C words rare, wife uses it more than me. She works in freight and the truck drivers use it. Otherwise it's a fairly offensive insult if you call someone it usually in conjunction with an F bomb.

Can be used as a polite way/to let someone know you're about to punch them. Kinda fighting words if it's gone that far.
 
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