How to eliminate words from your idiolect

Motivation

Why I’m writing this

I’m writing this a post because a friend and I were talking about how I’ve removed several words from my idiolect (the particular set of words used by an individual—kind of like your personal dialect). I mentioned that there are a number of factors that affect how hard it is to do this, and he was really curious to hear my advice on the subject.

Also, in attempting to do some research for this post, I googled how to eliminate a word from your vocabulary, and… nobody was really answering that question—nearly all of the posts were instead just lists of words to eliminate, with various justifications. So I thought I would step up!

Why might you want to?

There are tons of potential reasons to ditch words from your vocab. Off the top of my head:

• because they offend people (or trigger them)
• because they make you sound less confident (such as filler words)
• because they’re considered jargony or buzzwordy
• because you find they mask ambiguities (written about as Taboo your Words on LessWrong)
• because you don’t like certain thought patterns that use those words

Thought patterns, are, I think, the most exciting one. » read the rest of this entry »