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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

For those following along at home, the unpretentious word for "autodidact" is "self-taught"

It's not pretentious just because you don't know it. "Autodidactic" sums up a phrase using just one word. Basically it comes down to this:

Having a larger vocabulary allows you to spend more time communicating and less time talking.

Just like abstracting functionality away inside functions allows you to spend more time solving problems and less time (re)writing code.

You're certainly right about abstraction being useful. My fist thought was that the simple-English for autodidactic here would be "self-taught", being aware of unnecessary abstractions, though the subtler meaning is closer to "someone who will teach themselves".

Simply saying "self-taught" wouldn't have had the right connotation: instead of "clever and driven", it would have been, "but what have they missed?" and we would have missed out on this interesting off-topic sub-thread!

I thought there was a difference where self taught would be "I did teach myself this thing" and autodidactic would be "I have the personality trait of continually teaching myself new things." Only one of the dictionaries I checked made this fine grained (and relevant) distinction explicit though.

Is autodidact such an unusual word in English?

(I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)

Its the first time i've ever seen autodidact(ic). I assumed it meant self-taught based on context, probably like most of the others.

OK, probably I only know all the weird words you never actually use.

That actually happens a fair amount with non-native speakers, since our uncommon words are sometimes very similar to their common words. For example, an italian recently called me ascetic, and I had to look it up.

"Autodidacta" is the most common way to say "self-taught" in Spanish.

I love how English is quite happy to absorb new words, even if the English speakers only know a subset!

Back in school, we were warned about "faux amis", words which sound like they'd be right to an English speaker, but very much out of place to a native French speaker. I think in English we'd just accept any and all alternative meanings and let context sort it out, who's up for some creative reading?

Yeah, in Spanish it's not unusual or fancy.

In French (autodidacte) it's pretty much the canonical word for that concept, too (French is similar to Spanish in lots of ways).

Anti-intellectualism will be the death of us all.

Using that word may not be pretentious, but -- worse -- it is bad form. An intellectual might object to the word's use in this context simply because it is bad writing.

The goal of writing to communicate. Unnecessarily using obscure words clouds communication. In this case, I don't think the using "autodidact" was necessary. It did not add to brevity or cadence or coherence. It was a mistake.

The only thing worse than an anti-intellectual is a bad intellectual.

No, using precise words enhances communication. There are different connotations between the words.

"Self-taught" and "autodidactic" are denotatively equivalent, so from that perspective the word "autodidactic" is absolutely not more precise.

What's more, relying on connotation to enhance precision is kind of silly. Connotation is highly subjective and often inconsistant across a community.

One good example of this fact is that few people here seem to see the connotative difference between the two words in question. I don't.

Maybe you can help us. Thanks.

Ironically (or pseudo-ironically?), the very difference in connotation between self-taught and autodidactic is pretentiousness. Perhaps not quite pretentiousness, but more of a difference in social class -- a self-described autodidact is indicating that even though they are self-taught, they are not "blue collar" self-taught.

And it's not that self-taught always means lower class, it's just that autodidact always means higher class. There must be a better word in English for the type of distinction in words I am describing here, maybe someone can enlighten me...

Um, fuck you. Really, I mean it. My mom, a single mother, worked full time doing hard physical labor in a bakery. Her back is still sore from all the hard work she did to raise me and my brother. We lived in cheap housing, paycheck to paycheck for years, and went to pretty crappy public schools. I don't see how you get anything about economic class from the word I used.

We were poor growing up. I liked to read. I learned big words when I read, and I use them when I communicate. End of story.

Can you look at the actual post I responded to and explain how communication was enhanced in this case?

If there is a different connotation in this case, I'd argue it makes the post more confusing.

I feel like I'm in junior high getting bullied for being a nerd. I'm so sorry for using a big word. In the future I'll try and limit myself to a fifth grade reading level (maybe reaching rhetorical, which is a fancy word for a skillful kind of speech, heights of seventh or eighth grade level) so that the idiotic (for you mouth-breathers, idiotic is a big cloudy multisyllabalic way of saying dumb that fails to add brevity, or cadence or coherence) Techcrunch half of this forum can follow along without having to use a dictionary to find a word they don't know.

"Autodidact" is obscure? WTF? Where is this coming from? Did everyone come here right after watching the American Gladiator contest? Did we get an influx of Time Magazine readers?

For me, the goal of writing here is to practice at playing with ideas. If, in playing with ideas I use words that are (maybe, a little) obscure, and I fail to communicate to people who seem to me like idiots, well, I'm fine with that. Great, actually. If only the failure to communicate ran both ways.

I'm done being autodidactic. I'm going to put down my books and go watch some soap operas and sitcoms until I figure out how the idiots here think.

...and then you 'defend' yourself by finishing up with statements like that? Wow.

The only thing pretentious about 'autodidact' is the use of the word 'pretentious' to characterize a common vocabulary word.

It's not really that common, most people wouldn't know what it meant so it is a bit pretentious. Most people really would just say "self taught".

It's not at all pretentious to use a well-defined word whose meaning is precisely appropriate. To anyone who needs convincing of this I recommend a large stack of Christopher Hitchens.

What's pretentious is using big words to impress others. Most people who do this actually end up not using such words correctly, since nuances of meaning are hardly their primary concern.

Edit: what I really object to is your implied criterion that anything beyond what "most people" would say must be pretentious. Lord help us if we're supposed to go by "most people".

I think Richard Feynman would disagree with you, and his plain spoken manner is a symbol of how to be smart without being pretentious.

Using uncommon words appropriately doesn't make them any less pretentious unless you really don't know they're uncommon, and Christopher Hitchens, whom I very much like, is hardly someone associated with being unpretentious. Hitchens certainly doesn't suffer fools well.

So anything beyond what's common is pretentious? As I read the definition of the word, that's just wrong. On the other hand, looking things up in a dictionary to find out what they mean is so far from common that, by your definition, I'm being pretentious just for doing so.

Edit: your invocation of the name of Feynman strikes me as gratuitous (oops, I'm being pretentious there) and a textbook example of appeal-to-authority (or rather, it would be one, if you actually were quoting him or had the right to speak for him).

Edit 2: what on earth does "suffering fools well" have to do with being pretentious or not?

I wish there was a voice recognition program for smartphones that kept a running log of uncommon words within earshot. You could then click on the log to go to a definition. (Which would be pre-fetched and cached.)

Well, it's not really worth arguing about, but my appeal to authority was in response to an appeal to authority (Hitchens). If you don't agree the word is pretentious, fine, but to me and many others I presume (since I didn't start this thread, someone else called it pretentious first) do find that people who use uncommon words are being pretentious and trying to sound impressive with their vocabulary. Given a choice to say something plainly or with fancy words, the unpretentious choice is plain talk.

As for the reference to suffering fools, I was merely pointing out why I think Hitchens can be pretentious, but it wasn't really relevant, I agree.

Maybe ostentatious is a more accurate word, but it is a synonym of pretentious. In any case, I really don't care that much, so I won't bother arguing further, if you disagree with me, then let's just agree to disagree and move on to something more productive than arguing about words.

Ok, but I can't resist adding one more! First, it seems we do agree on what's "pretentious": not using uncommon words as such, but doing so to sound impressive with one's vocabulary. Also, I brought up Hitchens not to invoke any kind of authority but rather as rich source material for the inventive and pitch-perfect and endlessly entertaining (and, yes, unpretentious) usage of all kinds of words. It seems we agree on most of that :)

Lastly, I'd like to add something to this conversation that isn't merely being critical. The thing about less common words is that, often, they are not exactly synonymous with more common alternatives. There are often nuances that, consciously or otherwise, add to the meaning of what's being said. While thinking of this I remembered a brief post from Language Log a while back that I thought was brilliant. It takes several examples of forms that have been claimed to be interchangeable (and thus superfluous), and susses out real distinctions between them:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005487.h...

There must be a few people here who find language as interesting as I do, and would enjoy parsing out the examples they give. I'd post it as an item to HN but can't think of a title that could possibly convey the point. Oh well, maybe I'll just post it anyway...

Terrific link!

It's pretentious to say that it's pretentious; in fact, any use of the word pretentious is extremely pretentious, including this one. The use/mention distinction also breaks down for the word 'pretentious': it's not even possible to mention the word without being fatuously pretentious. This is especially true if the criterion for pretentiousness is whether "most people" would know what it is.

'Autodidact' is another matter.

It's IGNORANT to refer to that word as pretentious.

I have seen that attitude from the room temp IQ crowd - never thought I would see it here.

What lead you to believe that posters here have high IQs? Certainly not the articles or comments ;)

Average IQs would be sufficient to make his point. In my part of the world, "room temperature" refers to somewhere in the neighborhood of 75.

I've also met someone who thought it would be neat to be lumped in with the pseudo-intellectuals, because she thought it was a neat sounding word.

You are correct, but note that just because "self taught" is unpretentious, it is not necessarily the case that "autodidact" is pretentious.

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