Highfalutin Words

Use simple words if you can.

The Fix

The Sentence

Here is a sentence from a blog offering writing advice: 

What’s better is to ditch those big fancy words and use simple, yet effective words when you write.

Let’s fix this up.

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We should really go back to Zinsser and see what he says:

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what – these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and rank.

(from: William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), the chapter entitled Simplicity.)

Zinsser suggests that we substitute short words for long words if we can.  

While we’re at it, let’s take on the great man himself.  In the passage above, Zinsser writes “… these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”   We could easily get rid of some words: “… there are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”   

Here, again, is the sentence we want to fix with some words we can get rid of:

What’s better is to ditch those big fancy words and use simple, yet effective words when you write.

The sentence becomes:

What’s better is to use simple words.  

Odds and Ends

Long Words

The Roman poet Horace counselled against using “sesquipedalia verba”—“words a foot and a half long.”   Naturally this idea has made its way to English with the adjective sesquipedalian as in “Josh is quite sesquipedalian.  He makes it a point of not using short words if a long one is up to the task.”   

But sometimes a long word is the right word.  

For example, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the name of a Welsh village.  We have no doubt that Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochians use a much shorter pet name.  But that’s their village name and it’s a mouthful.  We might say that this name is of Brobdingnagian proportion.  

This last sentence makes the point that you’re going to have to learn some long words to be able to parse what some sesquipedalians write.  For example, in answering the Quora question “What is a long sentence with a lot of high vocabulary words?”, Neil Morrison, who self-applies the label “Perpetual Student,” wrote this:

The interrogatory which inaugurated this particular interlocution presupposes the existence of an erudite but languorous subclass of Quora participants who are prepared to eschew the customary virtues of transparency and comprehensibility by abandoning the apothegmatic and the laconic and choosing instead a wilfully perverse course of superfluous prolixity, unwarranted circumlocution (not to mention the intrusive parenthetical intercalation of tangential ephemera) and pernicious obfuscation in order to achieve a result whereby the transmission of semantic content is fatally subordinated to an egregious, vulgar, literary braggadocio in which the superficial and ephemeral grandiloquence of an unfettered and intemperate vocabulary coruscates inconsequentially to the detriment of interpersonal communication, pedagogy or empathetic rapprochement.

Neil is suggesting that the question presupposes a set of Quora readers who will read (and parse) answers like his.