Anonymous wrote:Never heard the word and if I read it in an email I’d think you were intentionally trying to sound braggy about your vocabulary or it was a typo.

The English language is wonderful. It is rich and nuanced and juicy and we should all feast on it and enjoy it in all its glorious variety. Peripatetic is a great word. It’s pathetic you think it is “braggy” to use a perfectly appropriate word just because you don’t know what it means. Maybe you should try to improve yourself by reading more instead of tearing down people who know things you don’t know.

Never heard the word and if I read it in an email I’d think you were intentionally trying to sound braggy about your vocabulary or it was a typo.

Wow, I consider myself a big reader, took 5 years of Latin (which helped immensely with vocab), and took a lot of lit classes, but I’ve never heard the word before! I learned something new today!

—37F

I’d start humming the theme song to A chorus Line around this person. Lol! I remember looking up the word after seeing the play for the first time, way back when.

Are you a Spanish speaker? Some words, like peripatetic, are used a lot more in other languages.

Makes me think of A Chorus Line:

She walks into a room and you know she's
Uncommonly rare, very unique
Peripatetic, poetic and chic

I feel sad that people’s vocabularies are so lacking these days. Keep these words alive. They express exactly what you are trying to express.

Anonymous wrote:I know what the word means and I might feel bad for you for living a peripatetic life in your 20s. You had fun (maybe?) but missed out or put off other things in life.

OP here. Interesting that you would think that. I married and had a child during this time, so no need at all to put anything off. We had so many great experiences that we would regret missing out on if we hadn’t embraced our peripatetic life.

I actually might feel bad for someone who stayed in one place their whole adult life- just think of all the experiences and opportunities they miss out on by never exploring living in new places.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PS: OP, can you write back something like "Oh, I was using 'peripatetic' in the sense of travelling, not in a negative way." No need to be clear that it's the only meaning, just leave it vague enough to assume that there may be more than one meaning.

a slightly more graceful way might be, "Oh I actually liked my peripatetic life! the moving around was great for me, though I know some. people would not love the constant change of scenery."

The smartest person i know uses his full vocabulary, and lots of context clues. He has a super high EQ and is sensitive to the fact that other people might not know the word only through lack of exposure, but almost certainly understand the concept. This is what he would do.

Yeah, that's not likely to correct the "pathetic" misread. He'll just think you actually liked your pathetic life.

Thanks for the replies! The person I wrote to is intelligent and educated, in fact has a MS from a top 20 university, so it didn’t occur to me that I was using a particularly difficult word.

The person can be very prickly, though, so I need to handle this carefully, if I do at all. It just bothers me that this person thinks I was unhappy during a time in my life that was very happy and productive for me and my family.

I will consider the graceful response suggested above and see if I can craft it in a way that works well for this person.

You're fine. Don't spend another second thinking about it. Assume people understand you unless you're talking with young children. Don't adjust your vocabulary with kids, just check in if they know the meaning to those words.

Anonymous wrote:PS: OP, can you write back something like "Oh, I was using 'peripatetic' in the sense of travelling, not in a negative way." No need to be clear that it's the only meaning, just leave it vague enough to assume that there may be more than one meaning.

a slightly more graceful way might be, "Oh I actually liked my peripatetic life! the moving around was great for me, though I know some. people would not love the constant change of scenery."

The smartest person i know uses his full vocabulary, and lots of context clues. He has a super high EQ and is sensitive to the fact that other people might not know the word only through lack of exposure, but almost certainly understand the concept. This is what he would do.

I would have used the word “itinerant” instead. Or just told them that I moved around like a little tinker.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PS: OP, can you write back something like "Oh, I was using 'peripatetic' in the sense of travelling, not in a negative way." No need to be clear that it's the only meaning, just leave it vague enough to assume that there may be more than one meaning.

This is a grateful response.

I can't tell if this is a typo for graceful, or the pinnacle of sarcasm. Either way it is grating on my nerves..

Does it ... vex you?

Anonymous wrote:I didn't know what that word meant. My vocabulary is decent. I would have just looked it up. NBD.

Same. And I would’ve appreciated the exposure to a new word.