[lordnacho]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

This is the thing about English. Everyone can learn intermediate English, but there's a long tail of vocabulary that comes from other languages. Often you find there's an English word, a French work, and a Latin word for something. You'll then discover that there's some subtlety of meaning between them. For instance, if someone has only figuratively been booted out of a position (politics), they've been defenestrated. You'd never say they've been tossed out the window.

Part of me suspects the French and Latin imports are to do with the elite who wanted to check if someone had been educated at the right places.

[tim333]

You only get defenestrate in quite pretentious literary essays. I'm English and only came across it recently. I think the availability of Google has made that sort of stuff more common writers can use obscure words and rather than have 90% of their readers not understand, now they can google it. English has a vast stock of words like that that some writer probably made up a centuries ago - there's a lot of old literature out there.

[smitty1e]

English's jumbo vocabulary makes it great for doggerel, because so many ideas can be phrased with multiple rhymes and syllable counts.

[ghaff]

And punny and other wordplay headlines. For example, I could absolutely see, if there were a politician named Fenwick who was fired, a headline writer doming up with: Fenwick defenestrated.

[brigandish]

It's not an uncommon word, even in speech. I did a quick check and the Times, Telegraph and Guardian all have plenty of examples of its use, too, across different sections of the paper. Even the Daily Mirror had 4 entries.

The Sun, however, came up blank.

[smitty1e]

The fact that English has an "eye doctor" and an "ophthamologist" is a direct result of the Norman invasion of 1066.

[gerdesj]

Ophthalmologist is derived from old Greek. I have never visited an eye doctor but I get my specs from an optician. Eye doctor makes sense as a concept and I have said it myself but is not routinely used.

The Normans brought Old French with them and that became the court language. Old English was more Saxon based. The classic examples of the effect of that invasion are meat vs animal names eg beef (French) and cow (Saxon).

[ghaff]

>I have never visited an eye doctor but I get my specs from an optician.

You sure? At least where I live, you get an exam from an "eye doctor" (typically an optometrist) when you get a prescription. An optician fits and sells glasses. Ophthalmologists are M.D.s who have broader latitude in prescribing medications, etc.

[timthorn]

This is one of the differences between UK and US English. In Britain, the term "eye doctor" just isn't used.

It's of a type with legislator vs law-maker; it's only really in the past few years that politicians in the UK have occasionally been referred to as law-makers.

[smitty1e]

Sure, I could have offered a better example, but the point is that English has enjoyed some wrenching integrations over time, Hastings having caused a big one.