Again, was not saying you are dumb, and in no way insulted your intelligence.
I'm sorry. I misunderstood what you were trying to imply. I had thought you were making the tacit assumption that my choice of words was some contrivance or scheme cooked up with the intent of concealing my supposed stupidity and lack of knowledge under a guise of a large and educated vocabulary.
Though in my defense, I'm not sure how you can reasonably think such comments like the following make it easy to avoid this kind of misconception:
Reads like a dumb man trying to sound intellectual
However, one must learn to forgo using each and every word one has learned if they are to speak in the most comprehensible manner.
As early on as I can recall, it has been pointed out to me that my use of language is difficult to parse, turgid, verbose, tangential, and sounds stilted and pedantic.
However, it is incredibly difficult for me to decide which words to use or not use to avoid people having this negative perception of my language. I find the whole business—of determining if a word is too pedantic, a phrase too stilted or turgid, a speech or comment too lengthy and prolix, a discussion or monologue too circumlocutory and roundabout, etc.—to be immensely stressful and challenging.
What is a big word, a pedantic writer, a wordy comment, or a tangential explanation? It eludes me. It's similar to an 'I know it when I see it'-type thing, like pornography or a funny joke.
Surely you don't see post #19 as the most efficient use of the english language?
Yes, I do. I felt and still feel that the comment efficiently and satisfactorily expressed my thoughts, and that the words I had chosen to employ were not very difficult, rare, or recondite for the average Anglophone.
More advanced and complicated words serve the purpose of expressing slightly different concepts than a more basic word, expressing a more specific concept than a basic word, expressing a concept in a way that is in line with the context and subject matter of the situation, etc. They're used to better get across a point when necessary. Your use of advanced vocabulary, for the most part, served no such purpose in that post, instead did the opposite, and made the post even harder to read.
I apologise if my comment was hard to read; my intention was not deliberate obscurantism, but effective communication. I'm not trying to sound like some epigone or purposive imitator of Hegel, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, or Lacan. I just write an idea in a way that I think most accurately and precisely reflects the way I thought it.
I presume this is why so-called thought disorders are about abnormal speech, rather than thoughts. This is because the way a person thinks is most easily evinced and readily salient in the way they use language to communicate.
Word salad, for example, is a thought disorder most commonly found in schizophrenics and psychotics. It's a linguistic depiction of the extreme disorganization and very poor coordination effecting the thoughts and the cognition of a person with psychosis.
I appear to be personally afflicted with a number of these thought disorders. These thought disorders are formally termed:
Stilted or pedantic speech
Circumstantiality or Circumstantial speech
Flight of Ideas
Pressured Speech
Cluttered Speech, and
Tangentiality
Each of these thought disorders are earmarks of a number of psychiatric disorders, including narcissism, Asperger's syndrome, high functioning autism and other autism spectrum disorders, a number of neurodevelopmental disorders and pervasive developmental disorders, ADHD, extreme anxiety disorders, mania (as in bipolar and related disorders), psychopathy, schizotypal disorder, and so on.
Most of these thought disorders I've enumerated seem to relate in some way to an underdeveloped or nonexistent theory of mind, as the overwhelming preponderance of psychiatric disorders which they're connected to or comorbid with, such as psychopathy or autism, possess a diminutive or absent theory of mind as a sequela.
And this is coming from someone with quite the vocabulary and intellectual capacity.
Not to split hairs here, but the extent of one's intelligence is only modestly correlated with the size of one's lexicon. Consider the physicist Richard Feynman. After having heard him speak in numerous videos online and having seen his own writing in several books, I can say with confidence that Feynman's intelligence and education were both unbelievably out of proportion with his language skills. His vocabulary was unimpressive and his writing was ungrammatical. Yet, he was easily one of the 5 greatest physicists of the last 200 years.
Feynman's first marriage had ended in divorce. Amongst Mary Louise Bell's, his disgruntled ex-wife, complaints about him was:
"He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."
Obviously, his intellect was impressive. But his proficiency with language could probably be surpassed by the average 10th grader.
By the way, one should take note of the incompatibility of the two notions presented here: a.) the size of one's vocabulary fails to provide a reliable or accurate indication of one's IQ or intelligence, and vice versa; and b.) speaking with an impressive or above-average vocabulary will give the impression of having an impressive or above-average IQ.
I am supposedly trying to sound intelligent by speaking with a large vocabulary. Therefore, I must necessarily accept the truth or veracity of notion B. But if one accepts notion B—that a sizeable vocabulary is capable of making one appear smarter than one truly is—they cannot simultaneously accept notion A—that one's vocabulary size does not provide a good or reliable indication of one's intelligence.
These two notions are mutually irreconcilable, because notion B contains the implication that smart people use big words, and thus using big words makes you a smart person. This embedded implication is diametrically opposed to notion A. Therefore, one cannot logically account for holding both notions at the same time.
Once more, no insult was intended. Simply a check to let you know that you went a tad overboard with the language.
Well, thank you for that entirely unsolicited, incredibly distracting, and unnecessary critique. However could I have lived without it?
