I'm reading this book "Birthmarked".

[conuly]

It's another postapocalyptic dystopia, which is why I picked it up.

As dystopias go it's a bit slow-going, but it's not that bad, until I get to the following line: "Her father was an autodidactic tailor who had never needed a pattern". Autodidactic? Autodidactic? What, pray tell, is wrong with the simple phrase self-taught? Sheesh. There's a time and a place for that sort of language. You don't sound smarter for adding more syllables just for the heck of it, you know.

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Sixteen is about when my vocabulary got strange, partly to show off and partly for sheer interest in and love of words. Luckily I outgrew it.

[conuly]

Thing is, the character's vocabulary isn't strange. It's just those two examples.

[redbird]

"Repose" is thoroughly euphemistic, and feels a bit old-fashioned as well (whereas "laid to rest" or "passed away" are also euphemistic, but feel current).

"Autodidactic," to me, would suggest that her father actively resisted letting other people teach him anything: tailoring, cooking, math, anything.

I read a book years ago called "The Day I Became an Autodidact," in which the narrator/memoirist came across the word in a book about someone else, who had used it to fill an otherwise-intimidating blank for "education" on some sort of form. It works for that sort of "where did you get your education?" and it works in the context of that book, by a teenager whose parents are fine with her finishing the minimum high school requirements and then doing other things (like both acting in local theatre and joining a writing group, not just hanging out) instead of going on to college. But here I wonder if the writer was given a thesaurus for Christmas.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

OMG, you should have heard me at 16; I'm sure I was utterly insufferable. Imagine that after saving the whales and learning a lot of 'colorful expressions' in late 20th century San Francisco, Spock got time-warped to 19th-century London and had to 'pass' in coffeeshop society there. That's kind of how I must have sounded.

I wasn't trying to sound that way, either. I grew up with extremely proper, correct language at home, where big words were understood and appreciated. Then when I was 9, we moved to the suburbs of New Jersey, where I found that the local children and I were mutually incomprehensible. Even the teachers there were unable to cope with my vocabulary, which had been considered a positive thing before that.

I had to deliberately teach myself to use slang, contractions, jargon, incorrect grammar and 'colorful expressions' in order to "talk like the rest of the world" (e.g. my non compos age-mates) in verbal speech. Meanwhile, I was at boarding school on the Philadephia Main Line, which is one of the last bastions of old-school Academe, so writing like a 19th-century essayist was racking me up a lot of A's. I made long, impassioned speeches with way too many big words and complex sentences, which doubtless were incomprehensible to most people, because at 16 I didn't understand that most people have (what I would consider to be) language deficits.

[conuly]

The difference between you and this character is that you used these words consistently.

These are the only two times the narrator pulls out the thesaurus for her thought processes. If she was going around all the time like this, I wouldn't think anything of it.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I dunno... the consistency is apparent to me in retrospect; I'm not sure it was apparent to others hearing me at the time. American English is huge and diverse; there are a lot of different dialects of it, but they're not well-delineated, so it's very hard to tell which of them one is supposed to be speaking at any given moment. At 16, I was consistently struggling to make myself understood in two mutually-hostile Philadelphia dialects, neither of which were native to me, and the speakers of which I regarded as mostly crazy anyhow. I don't think I was probably doing very well at it.

'Autodidactic'

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

That said, I certainly agree that autodidactic is a ludicrous word in any context outside its native groves of Academe. People really do still talk that way there, though less now, perhaps, what with the new Millenium and all.

I also have this nagging sense that there's something wrong with the phrase 'an autodidactic tailor'. Sure, it's a legitimate adjectival form of a word that does mean what the writer thinks it means, but... well... wouldn't 'autodidactic' translate to self-teaching rather than self-taught?

"A self-teaching tailor" sounds to me like a programmable sewing robot, not a live person. The word 'automatic' means "acting or operating in a manner essentially independent of external influence or control; self-regulating", but one wouldn't say "my father, an automatic tailor" intending it to be understood to mean that he is self-employed.

That's a fine distinction, though, and it might be characteristic of the character to not really grasp such distinctions.

[sarahwilder.livejournal.com]

Have you read Oryx and Crake? I'm doing a re-listen (audiobook) before getting to her followup.

[conuly]

I did, but awhile ago. I don't know where the copy is now.