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Why not just write hateful or awful instead of odious?

I'm always curious why people choose uncommon words, particularly when writing online where the audience is diverse.

Audience is diverse therefore one should only write for the lowest vocabulary?

That's a fair point and thanks for raising it. Diverse audience was just one example I had thought of at the time of writing. I agree that language shouldn't necessarily be "dumbed down" but equally, overly complex words can make the message difficult to understand. Written text on the web can be challenging to understand due to lack of tone, sarcasm, etc.

I appreciate the downvotes above as I didn't frame my message clearly, which likely came across as rude. My apologies GP.

I was mostly interested in WHY GP chose those words over others. I appreciate learning new words, as I did with OP, but my understanding is HN and other web forums is an area for chat rather than a novel.

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