Pecksniffian

Pecksniffian

From Dictionary.com:

Hypocritically and unctuously affecting benevolence or high moral principles

 

I could talk about the close-minded, hateful types who spout moral garbage while attacking those who live and think and function outside their very small sphere.  But instead I'll talk about how I dislike Charles Dickens.  I find his books to be long, dull, and overrated.  He also is the cause of ridiculous words like pecksniffian.  And, if I may be allowed another (related!) rant, in general the -ian suffix may be one of the worst (sorry, -ian, nothing personal, just the ways things turned out) in that it's mostly attached to proper nouns to turn them into extremely pompous-sounding adjectives whose sole purpose is to make the speaker sound intelligent by way of obscure reference.  (I will never forget the day I heard someone say "Foucauldian" (that's the adjective version of Foucault, a philosopher--I had to look it up) when talking about a professor.  I wanted to punch them.)  Speech is about communication and communication is about mutual understanding.  These linguistic pretensions (such as using phrases like "linguistic pretensions") are silly and annoying and the exact opposite of that.  I realize of course that specialized language is unavoidable.  A bunch of neurosurgeons get together or some professors of 19th c. Russian literature have a conference, of course they're going to be throwing around words that most people don't know.  But the bulk of those specialized words are just nouns, because that's what separates the different areas of specialization: things, different compositions of various parts.  It's the rest of the words--the verbs and adjectives and adverbs and prepositions--that everyone shares.  And obscure nouns are in a way simple.  Because nouns are pretty simple.  You either know them or you don't.  Object = name.  Someone at some time just slapped a title on something and you probably won't be able to break it down and figure it out piece by piece.  It's information you just have to commit to memory.  "The smeerx they've got over there is probably the best one available right now."  No clue what a smeerx is?  A little awkward perhaps, but not really a problem.  You ask and someone tells you using different nouns.  I find this infinitely less pretentious than "He is so Foucauldian, it's just embarrassing."  There's more to the word than the simple x = y relationship of a noun.  Sure, you've gathered that it's an adjective, but then you need to know who Foucault was, what his major beliefs or mannerisms were.  

I'm rambling and it's getting late, but essentially what I was trying to get to was that specialized nouns are necessary because things need names.  It can't be helped.  But generally speaking we don't need any other parts of speech to be specialized like that.  Words like pecksniffian are entirely unnecessary.  They're taking a very understandable idea and slapping an obscure reference to it.

I don't know if this counts as a "crazy long blog post" as promised in my pangram from yesterday (only promised, I'll admit, because I needed to get a 'z' in there), but it feels plenty long to me.  Let us all concentrate our positive energy on Dictionary.com's word of the day for tomorrow being something I can actually write about and so spare you all from any more of my attempts at linguistic criticism.