I thought that you, having quoted my original response, had read the full post and therefore seen what I had quoted above. This led me to expect that when you responded in the first place, you were already aware of who I was responding to. Therefore, I did not anticipate the necessity of re-posting the quote. To be absolutely honest, I still do not understand where your difficulty with this lies, or why you've felt the need throughout to approach the matter in the frankly rather rude manner you adopted from the start. If you think my reply was childish, perhaps it is (and perhaps so is the comment I'm making now), but so, I believe, is leaping into a discussion that you even now admit you weren't really following and refering to someone's opinion as "silly".
This is a argument, I apologised for the misunderstanding as you were clearly offended by my difference of opinion to what I though you'd said. This conversation is ended, have a nice day.
It's not the difference of opinion that offended me, just the way you saw fit to express it. I'm sure you're a decent sort in other circumstances.
Eh.... for me it really depends. Typically I'm less turned off by the use of big words when they don't seem to fit than I am by big purpley-prosed paragraph-length sentences used when it doesn't seem necessary to get the author's point across. Obviously this is a style preference, and believe me, I love abstract descriptive passages that really make me stop and think "huh, that's a neat way to think of it". But there comes a point for me where I stop being impressed by the author's creativity and start wondering if they're just trying to prove themselves. It's a delicate balance, and it's going to be balanced differently for every author, and even, every book/story. Usually I don't mind having to decipher words I don't understand. I like doing the "context" thing, and figuring out what a word means by how the author uses it. Obviously this method isn't always entirely reliable, but it's fun, and makes the experience more enjoyable for me as a reader. If I decide later in my own writing that I'd like to use that word but want to double check that I have the correct understanding of it, well, Merriam-Webster's is online now you know. You don't even have to purchase a big, honking, brick-sized hardback anymore to understand all the words in the English language. You just need access to a computer and the internet.
