Re: a stone with scratchings in it shaped like letters of the Hebrew alphabet

Subject:

Comments:
: : : Not to take away from the point here, but does anyone else find the word "abecedary" to be the stupidest sounding intellectualization? The thing is it is actually a very old word originating in Latin, before it was a dead language. We love to make ourselves sound intelligent no matter what era I guess. : : Before the last sentence, I was on the page with you. You have projected your feelings as a value judgment on some group called "WE". : : Abecedary the standard term used for this. Many of our terms come from Latin. Among those in a particular field who use the academic terms to convey established meanings, those terms don't make you sound any more or less intelligent than the person you are talking to. : : What else would you call it? "Alphabet" is most often use in the abstract, not as a physical written sample of the alphabet. "Inscription" doesn't say what is inscribed. And saying "inscription of the alphabet" is just too many words to be useful. : : And finally, we are dealing with an inscription from the era when Latin was used throughout the civilized world, when the word was used for this sort of thing. In finding a term for something that the greatest number of educated people will understand, the most logical thing to do is to employ a word that has already been used to decribe the thing for centuries. : : I hope I haven't sounded too intelligent for you here. ;-) : : I'm with you. I know all about using the terminology being an environmental scientist myself. But there are plenty of people who like to throw terms around to make themselves sound intelligent when a simpler more common term would suffice. My main point was really that the term originated from the letters "a","b","c","d" said in succession and turned into a descriptive according to Latin grammar. Basically saying, "We found an abecedary." is saying, "We found some ABC's." : But to expand on what you said, the point of language is to communicate and the burden of communication lies with the communicator, as opposed to the listener, so when someone, say an engineer or lawyer or acedemic, speak to common people or give interviews in common daily papers, they have the responsibility to avoid vocabulary that is not in common usage and speak in a way that the listeners can understand...unless of course they don't want to be fully understood. I guess the subtext here is that in my line of work, doing public education about technical things, I am constantly faced with people who don't know how, or refuse to speak common language to their audience. It was so bad with one group of engineers that we had to publish a list of vocabulary that we took to every meeting where they spoke because they insisted on calling a pipe a "culvert" and a ditch a "swale" and it got much worse than that. Naturally these guys were smart and correct in their vocabulary and in their tech manuals there is a reason they say culvert instead of pipe, it is a much more precise term for the device they are referring to, but if no one understands what they say the point is lost. This had two main negative consequences. The first was that people got angry because they thought they were being intentionaly deceived or talked down to and the second was that they often misunderstood what was being presented for their approval, thereby creating the perception that we pulled a "bait and switch" when they saw what actually got installed. : And one last example to illustrate someone who really DID want to come across more intelligent, I worked with a lawyer who sent letters out to us about a training saying, "Please be prepared to assist the training on Tuesday." So half of us went to her saying, "what are we assisting with, we were just scheduled to attend." To which she smarted back, "IF you consult a dictionary you will see that ASSIST can MEAN ATTEND!" But c'mon, in this case the use of that term didn't clarify any meaning, it only added confusion. The only reason for using that term, conscious or not, was so she would appear to have a better vocabulary thant the rest of us. : Lively discussion...thanks :)

Optional Link URL:
Link Title:
Optional Image URL: