Complex Vocabulary Quotes

Never use jargon words like 'reconceptualize', 'demassification', 'attitudinally', 'judgmentally'. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Without big words, how could many people say small things?

Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

If I'm a guy who doesn't seem so merry, It's just because I'm so misunderstood. When I was young I ate a dictionary, And that did not do me a bit of good. For I've absorbed so many words and phrases— They drive me dizzy when I want to speak. I start explaining but each person gazes As if I spoke in Latin or in Greek.

We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost second nature to us to prefer explanations . . . with a large vocabulary. We are much more comfortable when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to think that we know what the sunflower is up to. But we don't. The sunflower is a mystery, just as every single thing in the universe is.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.

Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?

That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.

William F. Buckley, Jr. does not so much speak as exhale, but he exhales polysyllabically, and the results are remarkable.

All those big words produce disgust today.

It's amazing how people believe you if you use long words.

Hindi is far easier a language to pick up than Tamil.

Hermione uses all these big long tongue twister words. I don't know what she's going on about half the time!

The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.

The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

Dune was really my first Hollywood job. It was such a small part, but I opened the movie. I was about 19 years old and I had to make this speech, and I didn't understand most of the words because they were, you know, words from Dune.