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Is it False Education?
I have noticed a trend, particularly apparent in the last 10 years or so (I'd say) to expand perfectly useful words, in an apparent attempt to sound more educated than one really is. At first, I thought it was just a few less-than-well-educated people making understandable flubs. The archetypical example are perfectly-capable police officers (e.g., who walk a beat or ride in patrol cars) who attempt to inflate their language in testimony or arrest reports, to appear more "professional." But then I began to see college graduates using words like orientate, instead of just orient. An example came to me in a YA question today, where the ask-er used the word "cohabitate" and several answerers carried that forward. In researching via the Internet, I found that that word is now appearing in a few dictionaries though many of those merely "define" it by presenting the original word - COHABIT. I can see that many (most) of these "new" words are verbs derived from the nouns that had to be created (e.g., orientation, cohabitation) but I just wondered if anyone sees the same thing I do, or whether it might just be another sign of my growing fogeyishness. (Yes, I know that is an artificially-generated word but I just don't know the correct form of a word for the sate of being an old fogey.)
4 Answers
- ?Lv 61 decade agoFavorite Answer
It's not false education. People try to follow regular patterns.
Children do this when they add -ed to every past tense.
"Look Mummy, I putted on my shoes by myself!".
Sometimes they're merely nervous because they are speaking on TV when they're not used to it. They use long words to sound serious and thoughtful.
I'm sure you're no older than I am.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
They have the same root words, but don't mean the same thing, for example, the Orient, literally means, "The East" refering to Asia and Indonesia mostly, meanwhile orientate, means to move towards the east, although a lot of people usually say it meaning to revolve around (think about how the world spins). Meanwhile cohabit and cohabitation (I had to look this one up) do mean very similar things, I believe cohabitation, is the verb, meaning living in the same place, meanwhile, cohabit, means to live in the same place. I'll have to pay attention to people using words like this, there is a subtle difference, but you could be right, people could use longer words to sound professional, I usually do the reverse, else I get asked to reword it. So in summary, I suppose no they don't mean the same thing, however some people, in their attempts to sound better educated, might use the wrong word just because it's longer.
Source(s): A dictionary and logical thinking... - Anonymous1 decade ago
no, lot of people want to give stress on a particular word that's why they expand the word.
