I love being able to see nuances that I couldn't see before. The word "proactive" means something to me. I see how the statement "it is what it is" might contribute to discourse. I couldn't see those things in high school. When I was a kid, my father had this book called The Politically Correct Dictionary or something similar. The thesis of this book was "OMG, look, these politically correct people want us to replace all these everyday words with these cumbersome expressions! Let's laugh at them!" Now I can see and articulately explain the precise nuances of connotation that the authors of this book were either blind to or ignoring, and I can productively use both the "politically correct" and the "politically incorrect" words to achieve specific effects.
I love being able to tell what language a person was thinking in when they said or wrote something. I love being able to look at a single innocent error and get useful information on how I should analyze the word choices for the rest of the source text.
I love being able to look at someone else's mistranslation and tell exactly how it happened and sometimes, if the language combination is one of mine or a cognate of one of mine, tell what they really meant without even seeing the source text.
I love being able to tell when an author's word choices are meaningful and when they're mindless. I can't always do this, but when I can it's awesome.
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