Big College Werds

Today at work I used the word "frenetic"...but not only did I use it, I used it in context, in a normal situation, in a normal nonchalant fashion and I used it with the full knowledge of what it meant.

My statment: "The past few Sunday afternoons here have been really frenetic".

This brought me to an epiphany of sorts. I realized that the farther along my college "Career" has progressed, the more propensity I have had to use big words to describe things in normal situations where smaller, easier spelled words would have sufficed. I could have just said, "the past few sundays have been freakin' crazy", but nope, I had to drop another big "college word"...as I call them.

It is almost as if my life has become entangled in the strange linguistic world of the "Daily Rice" (see link).

Of course the casual use of an extended vocabulary is a normal thing to me...or at least it seems like it should be. I'm a very verbally minded person pursuing a very verbally oriented degree. The funny thing is that I often try to limit my vocabulary when I'm talking to other people, not because I think they're not as smart, but because I don't want to come across as a "smart ass". I dislike the akward feeling of saying a word that I understand, in context, only to get a weird confused look from the other (often younger) person that I'm talking to. The same thing happens at work when talking to customers...espeically since a good deal of them are from other countries and have somewhat limited (allthough they do a good job with what they have) English skills.

A good example is this entry...I've used some big words in a casual fashion. It's not because I'm trying to in order to sound smart, it's because I'm not putting the usual brakes on the words I use. I'm writing in the way that seems "normal" to me. Often, in order to feel included, I will speak or write in a way that is really not reflective of myself, but of the common denominator of intellectualism that I feel I need to maintain in order to acheive the level of "popularity" or acceptance that I want. I did not realize, until just a few months ago, that I look at intellegence, particularly mine, in an often not so positive light. I think however, that this is a sign of a deeper spiritual problem that I have in the area of self-acceptance and self-image. I'm sure that I will write more on this in the future. Hopefully, I will write about it in a way that more truly reflects the verbally gifted person that God as created me to be.

I just want to be vulnerable. I don't want to worry about what others think of me anymore. I'm tired of it. It's a horrible and restrictive prison.

- Jordan

(p.s., I know that some words that appear in my blog are misspelled, that's because I'm actually just an average speller and I don't run a spell check on my entries. Not sure why, I just don't.)