Kotsko's Index of Forbidden Words -- Part 5

It's been a while since I've excluded any words from our discourse, but I've noticed that people have been getting progressively stupider since my last installment. This is more a public service than anything.

Pretensious -- This is used primarly by Amazon reviewers to criticize anything that highly educated people enjoy: French philosophers, obscure novelists, Radiohead, etc. The implication is that the highly educated people don't know what they're talking about and are just pretending to like certain things in order to appear intelligent. The reviewer, on the other hand, knows the real truth and is showing up all these "pseudo-intellectuals" (consider this word a sub-entry on the list) for the morons they are. The weird thing, though, is that the people who critique those who are pretensious never seem to offer anything positive. It might even be that they are just trying to appear smart by not going to the trouble to understand anything that's difficult to understand: "Those people think they're smart, but I'm so smart that I know that the stuff they like is stupid before I even engage with it at all." So who's pretensious now?
"Get it" -- I hear this constantly, especially in math classes. Do they want everything to be as easy as putting popcorn in the microwave? Yes, graphing trigonometric functions is hard at first. Yes, even multiplication is hard at first. When something is hard, that's not an automatic sign that it's stupid and worthless or that you're stupid and worthless. It just means you're going to have to take some time, maybe read something, maybe just let it percolate in the back of your brain for a while. So shut up and stop complaining about how you don't "get it." Nothing your teacher can say this second will make it suddenly "click" (let's stop using "click" in that sense, too).
Fair -- When people say something isn't "fair," they're really saying, "I'm not getting what I want." If you don't like a situation, that's fine: say so. Take responsibility for what you want without trying to rally a universal principle to your side.
"Writ large" -- This is somewhat obscure, and I apologize for this. Generally, it's used by magazine writers who are trying to be clever: "The 2000 election controversy was like a playground dispute writ large" or whatever other asinine thing. The term "writ large" comes from a poem by John Milton entitled "On the new forces of Conscience under the Long Parliament," which ends with the line, "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large." He's referring to the Presbyterian revolution in England, which was supposed to allow freedom of expression as opposed to the Anglican (priestly) Church. Milton is saying that the presbyters aren't interested in freedom of thought at all; they just want to enforce a different orthodoxy from what the Anglicans enforced. In other words, "presbyter" is just a long, complicated way of saying essentially what "priest" says. It does not mean that the problem with presbyters is the same as the problem with priests, only on a larger scale -- Milton was well aware that there were more people under the rule of priests than under the relatively new system of presbyters. It's not hard to come up with valid uses of the expression: "The supposed 'economic stimulus package' is just a 'tax cut for the rich' writ large" or "The 'preemptive strike against Iraq' is just a 'war for the benefit of oil companies' writ large" or whatever. But since no one has ever gotten it right in the history of the world since Milton wrote the poem, I think we'd be better off laying this one to rest.
Issues -- When you say you have "issues," you mean that bad things have happened to you in the past that still affect you. You know what a clearer way to say it might be? "I am alive." Just shut up. Seriously. Why does everyone have to be an amateur psychologist?
God's will -- This one should be pretty self-explanatory.