Getting late for you! momWhy just noticed! I know you want to savor all of Monday, your favorite day, afterall, but you are now in Tuesday, and your bed is calling for you!
I've had fun, @quid. Thanks for your time here! Sleep well!
It is rather amusing @user21820 that one does not know the nuances of nuance...
Often I find English writing full of stylish uncommon words. It is as if the writer wants to showcase their vocabulary and not content of the writing. I prefer writing which is simpler to understand. In India when I was in school proficiency in written and spoken English was a status symbol and some form of elitism. But now (25 years later) this has changed somewhat and English education became common place. But I guess some writers are still trapped there.
@ParamanandSingh Indeed. I don't mind using a complicated word if there is no simple substitute, such as "substitute". However, I don't use complicated words just for the sake of using them. It's also weird that it's difficult to actually ascertain the exact meaning of many complicated words, even with the help of lexicons and corpuses...
@user21820 And then there are the times that I use words which my students don't know. For example, I used the word "pedantic" in a precalculus class last week, and then had to have a five minute discussion of what that meant, because they didn't know.
And I accidentally used "ontology" in class yesterday. I wouldn't expect students to know that word, but I was tired, and spoke without thinking.
@user21820 I used "concatenate" in class recently, but assumed ahead of time that the students wouldn't know the word. I was describing the addition of vectors in \R^2 as the concatenation of arrows.
@user21820 I was trying to explain to them that "the area under the curve" is a nonsensical phrase until one has defined some notion of integral. We define the area to be the value of the integral, and not the other way around.
@XanderHenderson Are ye happy with the new hire? Of course it's too early to assess they are doing, but as a member of the search committee, are you pleased?
@XanderHenderson: congrats on raise in such times! The word "concatenate" is probably rare outside computer courses. I myself learnt it when dealing with "strcat" function in standard C library and then in a course on "formal language, automata theory". I was aware of pedantic but had to check a dictionary for ontology
@user21820: another major source of uncommon words comes from people who prepare for MBA (at least in India). I remember two such words "abdicate, abrogate" which were part of some list of words starting with "a".
@XanderHenderson I just caught this, and watched it now. Is it spoken in Russian? But even without understanding the narrator, or any characters, I very much liked the video. Is there any translation of it anywhere?
