May 13th 2008 10:35 am
On the Internet, no one knows your vocabulary
I was just reading some comments over at Scalzi’s place and I was surprised, although I don’t know why*, that didn’t know what “felch” meant. (potentially NSFW, NSFL definitions at urbandictionary.com. You’ve been warned.)
In a bizarre way, this reminded me of work. Not in ways that involve using specific sexual slang, but in ways where I use words that I just assume people will know and get back some very blank looks. A few weeks ago I alliteratively used morose, and the girl I was using it to describe stared at me a second and then said, roughly, “you know I don’t know what that word means, right?”
This made me morose.
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* Scalzi has a sufficiently large readership that specific, graphic terms very often fly over the head of parts of his readership. Also, there have been other mentions of specific, graphic sexual terms that have caused the same reaction from people in his commentariat.
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