Pet Peeves in Language

Everyone has his or her own pet peeves. These pet peeves range from physical annoyances to spoken language. For example I have a specific pet peeve with a common habit in our spoken language. I find it irritating when people I do not know very well give me generic nicknames. Common examples include sport and buddy. I feel like using one of these nicknames sounds degrading. It makes the speaker sound overconfident and as if they think they are above their audience. My least favorite nickname is “buddy.” I do not want to sounds mean but if I’m not friends with someone I do not like it when they refer to me as their “buddy.” I really do not mind when my friends or family give me nicknames, in fact I have nicknames for almost all of my friends. Personally I think that a nickname is a sign of friendship, which takes time to earn. Calling people by generic nicknames is a sign of disrespect. I would never use the term “sport” to refer to anyone I respected or wanted to make a good impression on, and I assume most people think the same. It almost seems like calling someone by his or her first name is becoming formal.

Cognitive Fluency

                While I agree with much of the article “Easy = True”, there are several ideas mentioned that strike me as false, or at least much too narrow.  It makes logical sense that people prefer things that are easy to process as opposed to those that are challenging – in some aspects of life.  When Bennett talks about how people perceive things as truth when they are repeatedly presented to them, well, that makes sense to me, too.  Not because someone sat in front of you and repeated the same few words consecutively, but because, generally, if we hear an idea once, and then happen to hear it again from somewhere or someone else, it seems more true because other people being aware of it somehow means it is more valid.  As we discussed aphorisms a few weeks ago, many of the most popular and most famous of them involve some sort of rhyming.  I think its true that when something rhymes we are more likely to remember it, and therefore, unconsciously more likely to except the idea as true in place of something that may say the same thing, just with different words.

                What I disagree with about this article is Bennett’s idea of what it means to us when something is familiar.  He uses familiarity as a synonym of simple.  And although I think it is obvious that familiarity with a person, place, image or idea makes it much easier to decipher, in other words, makes it so we can more fluently assimilate to whatever situation we are in, I do not believe (and science may prove me wrong but I still feel this way) that human beings, as a whole, prefer the familiar, or even the easy.  Everyone knows the saying “the challenege is half the fun”, and that holds true for so many aspects of our lives, whether it be in regards to relationships, academics, athletics, art, writing, reading, traveling – and the list goes on.  While I can thoroughly enjoy sitting down with some mindless romance novel, I also thoroughly enjoy sitting down with a book like Anna Karenina or anything by Maugham and having to read each page carefully just to make sure I don’t miss all the themes that are presented on them.  While I mostly enjoy professors that use language I can understand, my favorite classes are the ones where the professors have an abundance of knowledge that I am not yet familiar with and they present it in such a way that inspires you to want to learn more, know more, discover more.  While great professors may not provide their students with dry, boring texts, they also don’t stimulate their students by giving them easily deciphered, seen before material.  We don’t travel because we crave familiarity, we have an urge to travel because we crave newness and adventure.  When I buy something, many times its because it is unlike anything I already own or have ever seen.

                I especially find this notion of preferring the familiar, or the average, to be false when it comes to what we find as beautiful.  When I find a particular piece of clothing, or jewelry, that strikes be as beautiful it is because it stands out from the crowd, it looks different from all the other pieces surrounding it.  Many consumers are moved to buy things from newness – in packaging, production, appearance, etc—not from our level of comfort with a particular product.  I feel that many people find what is to them exotic, not prototypical, to be the most beautiful things of all, whether it be people, places, animals.  Of course, maybe I am wrong and this is only my particular opinion on this topic.  Yes, I think cognitive fluency is powerfully at play in many areas of our lives, but I truly hope that people look beyond names and fonts– of stocks, of candidates, or ideas – and at the content of what is being presented to them before they accept or reject anything as believable or true.

Response to Cognitive Fluency

The article about cognitive fluency brings up a lot of good points that can be interpreted in many day to day tasks that nobody ever really thinks about. For example, it states that stocks tend to do better when they have a simpler, fluent, more common name because it is recognizable and easy to process mentally. Personally, I think this is a good tactic when thinking of business names or product names because you make what you’re selling more relatable to the consumer, and will probably end up doing better. In today’s society, everything is in fast-forward, people running around looking for the fastest easiest way to get things done. It was only a matter of time before we figured out our brains did the same thing with the littlest things, like advertisements. We are always looking for shortcuts, and maybe it’s just because our brains are programmed to look for the shortest, fastest ways possible to get around, as seen with examples from this article.
Also, the point the article had that we base beauty or attractiveness based off of common ideas of beauty or attractiveness is interesting, and it makes one stop and think about how true that really is. With TV shows these days emphasizing lifestyles of celebrities and society-interpreted standards of acceptance and beauty, viewers are exposed to the ideal. This becomes imprinted in our brains, and from then on we only see beauty in what is familiar to the ideal. Faces become regular prototypes for the mind’s basis of familiarity. For example, from some of my observations there is a weird coincidence with people being in relationships with a person that looks oddly similar to one of their siblings. This creepy coincidence probably has something to do with this idea of cognitive fluency. As we grow up, we see more of our family than anyone else in our life, and it may just be nature to become familiar with these faces and look for someone else to spend such comparable time with that has a relatable face, proving your life may stay consistent and fluent if you’re surrounded by similar, familiar faces continually. Though this is just a strange theory, I think it is easily applicable to this idea of cognitive fluency.