Ask HN: Preferred word to describe “Unnecessarily complainsome grumpy person”?
by xeonmc on Hacker News.
I started reading HN fairly recently, the posters here struck me as having a different distribution of recurring (non-technical) vocabulary that is quite different from other platforms. I think that besides the obvious age distribution factor, the spectrum of social scenarios more frequently encountered by the HN demographic probably also contributes to certain common situations or stereotypes promoting/stimulating the use of more apt descriptions for them, whereas for those who less frequently encounter them there would be no occasion to dig out a dictionary word from memory to describe it. For example, there seems to be a particular adjective that sees pretty frequent usage, used to label “cranky jaded programmer being unnecessarily complain-some or dismissive of new ideas”, which I only learned because of repeated occurrence on HN, but the actual word seems to escape me. I remember that it seems to be not too dictionary-obscure of a word, just that there seems to fewer occasions that calls for it in other online conversations. What is the first word that comes to your mind when describing such a person?