Are you a fancy word packager? Do you say "intellectually challenged" when you mean STUPID? "Plain" when you mean UGLY?

Uh… no.  I call ‘em like I see ‘em.   I am definitely NOT “pc”!!  (although I do try to be “nice” about it).
I call a spade a spade and a shovel a shovel (there is a difference).   An idiot is an idiot is an idiot.  They’re not “scholarly diminished” or “information challenged”, they're an idiot!.

(Incidentally, George Carlin did a great bit on this very topic.)

I like to think I have and use a reasonably wide vocabulary, but I use plain, simple language normally, and technical terms appropriately. I may use otherwise-needlessly flowery words or phrases on occasions for particular effects but otherwise, call a spade a spade!

I don't know how that clause arose but have seen a suggestion that it was inspired by some official writing "agrarian manual instrument" in some document or other.


That word plain by the way, in British English, means just that - straightforward, unadorned, ordinary, unremarkable. It does not normally mean "ugly", though calling someone "plain-looking" might still be derogatory.  


As an example of using technical terms properly, not as mere jargon, in past years as a laboratory assistant I would sometimes be asked to arrange test-pieces in an accurately-spaced row. The particular engineering terms are simply, "at x pitch", or "at x centres", where x is that constant spacing in a regular pattern. I could never persuade the scientists I was helping, to use that simple term instead of their clumsy, "at x centre-to-centre distance"!


I think the worst fancy-package types are modern business managers, with such twaddle as "identifying a requirement for" [the word 'need' perhaps?], "thinking outside the box" and "mission statements". Sports commentators and pundits merely use long words to try to sound clever in their usual bland, semi-illiterate, statements of the obvious or speculation. Politicians are usually just propagandists! Celebrities tend to pretensions of, like, illiteracy, like.

The best public speakers, I think, include senior judges and high-ranking military officers; as a result of their professional speaking. Judges have to explain or give instructions on legal matters normally outside the knowledge and experience of defendants, plaintiffs, witnesses and jurors from very wide-ranging backgrounds, education, etc. Senior military officers have appropriately-knowledgeable subordinates but still have to convey information and orders clearly, concisely and accurately, and in action, to do so under considerable stress and difficulty.  

Despite the ones I knew, of whom some were far better at hard sums than simple English, many professional scientists now recognise they need explain their work so that lay-people can understand and appreciate it. Indeed, that skill has become something of an academic speciality itself; teaching scientists, statisticians and their ilk to convey difficult subjects clearly.