My favourite words
A list of words I keep using and spending a lot of time thinking about.
I know what you might be thinking, here comes a list of rarely used exotic english words that he will use to showcase his strong vocabulary. But no, I am not a huge fan of words like that.
I understand that some feelings, ideas deserve their own word. It allows for succinct prose. I remember being very happy when I first saw the word Serendipity - "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way."
I could express myself better now, there was this vague idea that now was made concrete. But it is not often that I find the need to use it, nor is it easy to find people who will understand the word clearly. They might just guess at the meaning from context.
I like to think of communication as a pipe between me and a listener with the diameter of the pipe being determined by who has the worse grasp on the language in terms of vocabulary. If we both know all these nice words, or technical jargon then we can quickly communicate. But more often than not I see fancy words being used to signal their abilities or to confuse.
Now that I have gotten my disclaimer out of the way, I present to you - My List
Abstraction
Analogy
Allude
Actionable
Accumulated privilege
Approximate
Art
Bias
Caveat
Context
Conflate
Connotation
Control
Constraints
Coercion
Compersion
Communicate
Closure
Culture
Coitus
Digress
Dilemma
Distill
Double standards
Dogma
Explicit
Emergent
Equivocate
Emasculated
Empathy
Encoding
Euphemism
Facade
Fascinating
Facet
Generalize
Hypocrite
Heuristics
Implicit
Idiosyncrasies
Ideals
Identity
Ideology
Indoctrination
Inconsistent
Incentive
Innuendo
Innocuous
Invariant
Intangibles
Intuition
Internalize
Interaction
Interpretation
Individual
Insidious
Logic
Maps
Motivated reasoning
Model 💓
Methodology
Meta
Noobs
Notion
Nuance
Narrative
Norms
Ontological
Ossify
Objective
Paradigm
Perceive
Perceptives
Persona
Platitudes
Posterity
Procrastinate
Privilege
Quirk
Rationalization
Reciprocate
Resolution
Respect
Reification
Risk
Realpolitik
Rhetoric
Sad
Semantics
Simplicity
Stereotype
Steelmanning
Subjective
Structure
Symmetry
Symbol
Tenacity
Triggered
Travesty
Tradeoffs
Tropes
Truth
Trust
Veneer
Vicariously
Value
Whataboutism