I'm not complaining about people using 'intermittent' and 'sporadic' interchangeably; I can't actually recall any notable instances of anyone using 'sporadic'. I'm complaining about people using 'intermittent' to describe any occurrence pattern they don't understand.
In real life, when people describe a phenomenon as "intermittent", they mean "it just happens whenever it feels like it and I don't know why, but if I use a word with a lot of syllables to describe this, I'll sound clever rather than stupid." I have had people use the word seven or eight times in the space of a two-minute phone call.
People using a word to signal something while oblivious to the actual, useful, important meaning of that word wind me up no end. This is possibly why I don't get along with critical theory.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-05-18 10:31 am (UTC)In real life, when people describe a phenomenon as "intermittent", they mean "it just happens whenever it feels like it and I don't know why, but if I use a word with a lot of syllables to describe this, I'll sound clever rather than stupid." I have had people use the word seven or eight times in the space of a two-minute phone call.
People using a word to signal something while oblivious to the actual, useful, important meaning of that word wind me up no end. This is possibly why I don't get along with critical theory.