as much as I dislike the clock app and still believe it has an ultimately detrimental effect on lots of things, one floating iceburg tip of discourse has me thinking a lot lately.
obligatory preface of [my area of research was not primary education pedagogy and never has been].
but that said, "using big words is ableist and inaccessible" isn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to draw for the generation(-ish? maybe more?) of kids in the US who weren't taught to read phonetically, but instead taught via three-cueing: basically, to look at a word and then give their best guess at what it could mean, based on the first letter, surrounding context clues, and pictures (which are ofc notably not often present in longer and more complex works of literature, unless to serve as illustrative figures).
anecdotally, it explains how I feel like it's a fairly common occurrence now to read an internet argument and think that one of the participants isn't actually reading what another person said, but is instead skimming at best. I realize now that no, really, it might actually very well be the case, because people taught in that style might not be able to discern the written meaning of what they're seeing at all. they might actually legitimately be projecting some entirely unintended meaning onto what they see because they aren't reading the word itself at all, but merely using cues to approximate.
and like, yeah, as insulting as the argument is to disabled people (as are many arguments to stop doing things that require more than the absolute minimum effort, see: a lot of genAI justifications for making it do basic shit 'for convenience's sake')
I imagine more complex words do feel inaccessible to people who can't use the crutches they were incorrectly taught to rely on, at no fault of their own, and don't have enough experience to know where else to start.
the answer, of course, would never be to abandon more complex words entirely. that just feels like trying to put a fire out with gasoline.
but it does have me wondering how to show people who learned how to read that way some effective methods for using a thesaurus or dictionary, without incurring more user frustration.