What kind of position is a polysyllabilist ?

[Lauren]

> From: Lech Rzedzicki

> I have exchanged emails with a person who seems to have "senior
> polysyllabilist" as a job title.

> Sounds very elaborate, like a person, who is able to pronounce
> multi-syllable words with no effort at all.

A polysyllabilist is a "sesquipedalian." <tee hee>

I call myself a documentationalist for fun.  I've also held the title of
Chief Human Interface Engineer.  That's when I engineered web applications
that ran on a MySQL database.

My guess, is that "polysyllabilist" is somebody who can use words with more
than one syllable, but I saw it used to describe William F. Buckley Jr. in
my search of the word.  It seems like the term is applied to people who use
unnecessarily large words, which is not a good thing for a technical writer.

Here's a discussion about the word,
http://wordsmith.org/board/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/69/page/349.
 
> Any other insights?
> Is this a method to avoid the payscale ceiling for Information
> Develeopers?technical Writers?

Not likely.

I would try to email that person with a message composed entirely of
monosyllabic expressions and see if the polysyllabilist notices the joke.
Really, I think that it would be harder to write that message than to write
one with multiple syllables.

Lauren