[ibatindev]

Noam Chomsky on suicide watch

In my point of view this is actually good news; Since I'm not a native english speaker and since this language has become the world's lingua franca it's very nice being able to understand an article just because the author's didn't waste time looking for bombastic synonyms just to sound smarter. I applaud this and projects like Simple English Wikipedia which allows us, non-native english speakers, keep learning.-

[whatshisface]

The rising proportion of non-native speakers in US academia is what I thought of when I saw the article's claim that academic vocabulary is shrinking over time. Papers written by adult language learners tend to cluster around domain terminology + the absolute most common English words + words that happen to be similar to ones from their native language, and there's not a lot of incentive for them to go read Charles Dickens until they're indistinguishable from native speakers because, really, it doesn't matter and nobody cares.

[avs733]

Add in “grant writing specialists” with no domain expertise but lots of “test the nsf as an api” expertise and you have even bigger sources of error in these claims.

[woodruffw]

> bombastic

Esoteric synonyms, perhaps? :-)

[chongli]

Synonyms for the word bombastic, not synonyms having a bombastic character.

[jcampbell1]

I think he meant sesquipedalian synonyms.