Big Words Are Wonderful
Thank you, to everyone who read and took time to comment on 9 + 1 Things Every Reader Wants from a Writer. The post and the discussion became much of what I personally think is the appeal and the addiction of blogging — learning by an interactive, rolling dialogue.
One point in particular seemed to get several comments. It was this one.
Set aside your expensive vocabulary. Donââ¬â¢t use big words, when perfectly good little words communicate easily. I donââ¬â¢t read with an online dictionary, and I donââ¬â¢t want to.
It seems folks were worried that I don’t like big words at all. I love them. I like the way they sound and the way that you can find one that will precisely pinpoint the idea that you’re going for. The point up above that I didn’t make clearly — yeah I’m unclear too, go figure — is that I was writing the 9 + 1 post in the voice of average readers, who don’t have time to go looking up words that might get between them and your message.
El Hakeem pointed out that some folks DO like big words and enjoy learning them. Starbucker is one in particular. He reads William Safire for that very reason. They’re right, you know. If your audience shares your love of vocabulary and finds new words delicious, I’d never ask you to take that away from them. I don’t expect that you would, even if I did.
I was talking about folks who use big words to make themselves or their writing sound smarter. Using vocabulary that way isn’t authentic and readers can tell.
Tony Lawrence left a story in a comment this morning that is a perfect example of how a guy can get caught doing just that.
Many years ago I had a partner who sometimes liked to brag about his education. I think he liked it all the more because I am mostly self educated – I dropped out of high school the moment I was legally able.
Anyway, Don (weââ¬â¢ll call him Don because that was his name) had prepared a new company brochure and was presenting it to me and another partner. As I was reading it, I came across an interesting sentence:
ââ¬ËWe provide simple pneumonic phrases to help you remember the commands.ââ¬â¢
ââ¬ÅDon, what the hell is a ââ¬Ëpneumonic phraseââ¬â¢, I asked (not all that pleasantly).
Don nearly preened himself. ââ¬ÅWell, if you had the benefit of a college education, youââ¬â¢d know that a pneumonic is a memory aid.ââ¬Â
I shook my head. ââ¬ÅI am an autodidact, you fatuous ass, but I know how to spell and I know that the word you were thinking of is ââ¬Ëmnemonicââ¬â¢ and that YOUR word is more usually found in conjunction with plaguesââ¬Â. I wrote ââ¬ËMNEMONICââ¬â¢ out in large letters as I said that.
ââ¬ËBenefits of a college educationââ¬â¢ indeed.
Thanks, Tony, for letting me share your anecdote. (That qualifies as a big word.) You did what I couldn’t do and you did it artfully. I probably would have had readers screaming, “Liz, the darn horse is dead.”
By the way, my favorite word is despicable. It sounds like it should have punctuation inside it. What’s yours?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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My most favorite word is “brachiate”, but it’s hard to work that into a conversation ordinarily.
I’ve always liked “obfuscate” also – that’s a little easier to place well.
“quixotic”, “quiescent” and other “q” words are nice to have on the triple word spots in Scrabble. Even more nice when you can use all seven of your letters (extra 50 points). Last year in one memorable game I managed to use all my letters three times and two of them were on triples – and yet the final score left my wife trailing by only three points.
I love words also 🙂
Heck, Tony, without words . . . what would we talk about?
We’d grunt and point a lot. Lots of wild hand gestures, becoming more frantic as we realized that no one is comprehending. Slowly, over centuries, we’d codify the gestures and reinvent ASL.
I dislike improper use of words. It doesn’t have to be as gratingly bad as “don’t have no reason” to set my teeth on edge; many things I hear every day by NPR commentators cause me to shake my head in disappointment.
Worse, I think, is conscription of perfectly good words into service of a thought they have no business with. From “Through the Looking Glass”:
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Sometimes grafting a word into an uncustomary place can produce wondrous results – your mind takes fire from it and although it technically was “wrong”, it happens to be oh so right.
Unfortunately, more often it’s a bastardly use that causes me to loose more tooth enamel.
I’m mostly with Alice:
`That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
Oops: “lose” not “loose” 🙂
We have rule here at Successful-Blog. There is complete forgiveness for spelling and punctuation errors in the comments. 🙂
Cantankerous is a good word too. Liz, I liked this whole post. It seems like lots of what it boils down to is the motivation BEHIND why you write… who you are underneath it.
In my songs, I invariably end up cutting out the lines that make my big ol’ ego think, “Ooo. That’s really brilliant.” Usually those are the lines I’m clinging to the hardest at first. But they always end up getting edited.
If someone is trying to “impress” with the big words, then readers (and listeners) see right through that. But if someone just naturally uses good words well, readers will eat that up. (At least I do. And I can be cantankerous!)
So, when a writer knows herself well (which, obviously you do) then some of this stuff comes naturally, albeit not easily. Thanks!
Cantankerous is a wonderful word. It fills up the head and the mouth!
There’s a phrase in writing about those lines you’re talking about. They’re called the “little dearies.” You’re supposed to let them go. I guess it’s like letting your children grow up and leave home. 🙂
I know my most brilliant lines sometimes get written down in a book when I cut them, and I use them to start a new piece later . . . often only to cut them again. 😛
I’ve sometimes thought I should keep a book of my “brilliant lines” – now I know why I don’t 🙂
Nice chatting with y’all this morning, but it’s time to get some real work done. Catch you tomorrow or soon, at least.
Thanks for coming by, Tony.
Thanks especially for the story, er anecdote. 😛
Perhaps my word that should wrap up this post is “pedantic.”
In editorial at my old publishing company, we would call that sarcasm. 🙂
Liz, my favorite is “insouciant”, which means, “a lighthearted unconcern”. Yes, as opposed to a heavyhearted unconcern (haven’t found a word for that yet – where’s Bill Safire when you need him). This word started by love of vocuabulary. One of my first bosses would post a “word of the day” on the wall every day and then use it incessently. He loved that one (because that nailed his personality to a “t”). Now it’s in my brain forever. PS: really enjoyed (and agree with) Tony and Christine’s POVs on this one too.
I have a fondness for “insouciant,” too! I think of it as “blatantly nonchalant.” It was once my goal to develop that characteristic, but I didn’t know how. 🙂
I first read it in an Chicago Tribune news article. I have no clue what the article was about.
Another word I came across on a Word of the Day calendar that caught my fancy was “truckle,” which means “to act subserviantly.”
Recalcitrant…
If you can use it in a sentence then you probably know what it means.
Use it on your boss one day, and see if he has to look it up.
Joe
BTW, I can actually see what I’m typing now without glasses.
J.
Hi Joe,
I like word as well. “Though I’m shy to use it,” she demurred.
My eyes like the new typesize too. It took me the longest time to ferret out which part of the code actually controlled it. But this new header gave me the energy to try one more go at it.
And this time I finally won.
I am so glad you did, now…
I can see… I can see…
I am going to go play with the code at my new home, just to tweak.
Same time tonight???
Yes. I’m so glad too. My stress level in looking at my computer is so much lower. Tonight will easier to talk. Don’t you think?
Same time — Yes. I’ve already posted it. 🙂
By the way, if Don had the benefit of four years of Latin as I did, he probably would have known that “pneumonic” had to be wrong.
That is the one part (and probably the only part) of my formal education that I wouldn’t have pursued on my own initiative – and knowledge of Latin roots has been more than helpful in understanding strange words both written and spoken.
Type sizes are an on-going struggle. My son-in-law, a professional webmaster now working at Boston University, tells me that he’d always try to make fonts larger but that the media “experts” would force him to decrease them.
Apparently no media experts are over thirty.
What am I doing back here? I still have work to do!
Hi again Tony!
Yeah, I’m glad on one hand that I didn’t have to take Latin. I went to a small school and I didn’t like the kids who did. On the other hand, I’m well aware of what it is that I missed.
On the type issue, I don’t know why they’re so stingy with space — those kids under thirty. We’re on the web. It’s not like we’re wasting paper. Ahhh. They’re hoarding bandwidth for the video. Type can’t anything.
“type can’t anything”
Indeed it cannot 🙂
I sometimes think words are alive. Usually they quietly sit on a page and mean one thing, but sometimes they can be slippery, so when you read them again they mean something else. If you don’t watch out they’ll get away from you. Some like to shine (the ‘little dearies’), while others just do their job in a workmanlike way.
I didn’t take Latin in school, and never really learned grammar until I took German, but I do a lot of reading. A poorly formed or badly worded sentence can be like looking at a painting that has been defaced (not that I’m innocent).
Hi Rick!
I love the first paragraph of your comment. It sounds a lot like things I write on my writing blog. I like words just for the sake of liking them. Some have been truer to me than some people have. 🙂
I know what you mean about bad sentences. I saw one once that started like this.
On the morning of yesterday eve, . . .
I hope you’ll come to open comment night tonight, you belong with the group of us that hang out there.
I DO enjoy reading all of this! Your post, Liz, all the great comments and great words! That’s right, I love words!
One of mine is dis-con-certing. Two very different prefixes and together they make perfectly sense…
And I’d like to share one of my favorite lines of Somerset W. Maugham (I’ve read it in German so I’m giving the gist):
“Words are tyrannic beings. If you don’t follow them meticulously you don’t follow them at all.”
That’s a pretty radical statement. I find it illuminating over and over aagain.
Tania
Tania,
That’s so wondeful! If you donââ¬â¢t follow them meticulously, you donââ¬â¢t follow them at all.
The play on words there is brilliant! I think I’ll put that up on my wall.
Disconcerting is one of my favorite words to use when I write a letter of complaint.
Dear Mr. Jones,
i found it disconcerting that your product ate my cat. 🙂
It always get their attention, and it makes me feel good to write it.
Liz
It’s really heart-warming to find a secret tribe of fellow word-lovers. Before I started my career in finance, I maintained an ardent romance with large words. I loved how a wide range of synonymns could have similar meanings but with different shades of connotation. I loved how certain long words flowed mellifluously off the tongue (rather like the word mellifluous itself).
When I got into finance, the dictum in business comunication was, never use big words when small ones would do; never use long sentences when short ones will do (Charles Dickens, my favorite writer, was a master of the winding, convoluted, but unendingly engaging sentence). I was crestfallen: is there a conspiracy to reduce the gloriously extensive English vocabulary to 200 or so words, simply because the majority of people never bother to expand their vocabulary?
I do think people should be less shy about using big words- it’s sad that society makes erudite people seem pretentious (though you’ve got to admit the ‘pneumonic’ guys are largely to blame for this). I adore the feeling I get when I read a word I don’t know or have long-forgotten, look it up, file it in my head somewhere, and say “I’ve got to use that someday.”
I love all kinds of words. But for some bizarre reason, my favorite is ‘scurrilous’. I heard the magnificiently eloquent lawyer, F. Lee Bailey use it during an interview once, and I simply swooned.
El Hakeem,
I like long words, and fun words like skulking, but I also like the music of the language made with using quarter notes and eighth notes too. I can imagine your your frustration in a finance job. Finance works aren’t known for their word play. Are they?
If you want to have some fun tonight, You should look in on the fast conversation over at open mic night. We like to play and use our imagination — and play with words a bit for a few hours.
You’ll find it at
The Mic is on in Thassos Island, Greece!
My thought (its too late at night here for multiple thoughts) is the same when i used to do public speaking is that never use words bigger than your audience is going to understand. Human attention spans being what they generally understand many are not going to keep reading if that don’t understand the words (unless they are like me whose best friend is dictionary.com).
HI Greg!
Thanks for your thought. I know the feeling of being at the place where thoughts come only one at a time. That thought you brought is useful contribution, though. And I appreciate you taking the time to write it down for us to keep,
People do have trouble sometimes staying with the message if they need to leave it to go look up a word in the middle. That’s sort of what I was trying to say. You said it better and for that I thank you, Greg.
I hope to see you back again soon.
Liz
I love the little latin phrases that I remember from school: quid pro quo, res ipsa loquitor, de facto, voir dire, and stare decisis.
It’s nice when they are used appropriately, too.
Hi Mary Jo,
Welcome!
I love the latin ones also. I get a little tired of the french ones for some reason. Even more than both. I really like your second sentence.
It’s very nice whent they’re use appropriately.
“Set aside your expensive vocabulary”
Er…..I assume that they mean “extensive vocabulary”? : )
Welcome Dave!
No actually, I really meant “expensive” vocabulary. Some folks think that big words cost money. 🙂