I recently reviewed Peter’s new edition of The Thinker’s Thesaurus
My vocabulary is perfect; yours is pompous or deficient
As a group, those who read the blog posts on this website are about as linguistically elite as they come. Therefore, one would think that the introduction to an unfamiliar word would be cause for pleasure and present a welcome opportunity to look up the word in a dictionary. And yet, even among this group, I doubt this would be the reaction. Rather it would be something to the effect of: “That writer is pompous!” Among less erudite readers, that reaction is even more guaranteed.
People don’t realize how frequently hard words are presented to us because the natural inclination of most people is simply to glaze over them, as if the word doesn’t even mentally register.
Consider the following from a recent editorial in a Pittsburgh newspaper. It related to the fact that Pennsylvania gubernatorial hopeful Tom Corbett released a newsletter announcing that he would join the lawsuit by other State Attorney Generals against the new health care law. Joe Hoeffel, also running PA governor, lambasted Corbett for his reference to “Pennsylvania’s sovereignty.” “We fought a civil war to uphold the issue of federal supremacy”, Hoeffel said. In criticizing Hoeffel for criticizing Corbett, a recent editorial in a Pittsburgh paper said: “The fact that Hoeffel views [state] sovereignty as a four-letter word is absolutely sciolistic. Back to school, Joe. Google Article I and 10th Amendment.”
The word “sciolistic” means a pretense to scholarship. It was absolutely the perfect word choice for the occasion. But how many readers of the article either knew that word or, more importantly, would stop to look it up? Very few? I bet it would be the same with readers of this blog, even though it is hard to imagine a group more likely to appropinquinate 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT’s.
Is the use of the word “sciolistic” offensive to you? Should I have used a different word than appropinquinate? Whether or not they would admit it, most people would answer yes to both questions. This is so for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that we live in a linguistically correct world where “my vocabulary is perfect while yours is deficient or pompous.” In other words, we each subconsciously set ourselves up as the barometer for what words are reasonable and what words are not reasonable–we are each the proverbial “reasonable man (or woman). So, if I question a word you use, you may scoff at my limited intellect. But if I use a word you don’t know, you may sneer at my pompousness.
As William F. Buckley once stated: “We tend to believe that a word is unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar to us.”
Another factor for our trend towards the “lowest common denominator” is that, for decades now, our English instructors (and editors as the case may be) have drummed it into us to “keep it simple!” What this should be taken to mean is simply to write well. What it has been taken to mean is an admonition not to use any words which may not be familiar to the entire audience.
Hard words can be beautiful things. It is true that there are some hard words which are basically exact equivalents for easier words. For example, an ecdysiast is a stripper. Most of them however take the place of a number of simpler words and thus are more economical and more powerful. They grab the reader’s attention.
In a recent edition of The New York Times Book Review, Miranda Seymour was reviewing a book by Dominque Browning discussing her life after her magazine House and Garden was closed down in 1997. She wrote: “While waiting for a misconceived blind date dinner to run its slow course, she devises innumerable strategies to endure its longueurs.” (longueur: tedious passage).
In a recent issue of Newsweek, managing editor Jon Meachem, in discussing the magazine’s financial troubles, stated: “We are not Planglossian about the issues at hand.” (Planglossian: blindly or naively optimistic based on Dr. Pangloss, the optimistic tutor of Candide in the novel of the same name, by Voltaire).
A big topic in Philadelphia recently has involved a man named William Barnes who shot a police officer in 1966. The officer was paralyzed from the gunshot and died several years ago. Although Barnes had already served a lengthy sentence for the shooting, he was just arrested again and charged with murder because, as stated in a local paper, the officer’s death “was a sequela of the actions of Barnes”. (sequela: secondary consequence or result).
How about this one–in last week’s New York Times, in an article about the number of friends people have on Facebook, the author wrote that Jeffrey Toobin “credits (or blames) the electon of 2008 for his Brobdingnagian list.” (Brobdingnagian: very large).
Note that these are all examples which have appeared just within the last few days. Could the authors have possibly used words other than sciolistic, longueur, Panglossian, sequela or Brobdingnagian? Perhaps. But, not only is there no single word that could have been used instead of any of these words and those alternative words would be boring.
If we are to avoid a permanent shrinking of our collective vocabularies, we must get away the mindset that the use of hard words by others is simply a poor reflection on the people that sue them. The presentation of hard words ought to give each of us the chance to expand our vocabularies. After all, if a word is in the dictionary and not listed as archaic or obsolete, then it is a legitimate word entitled to the same respect as any other word. We cannot engage in a “hierarchy of legitimacy” with respect to words. Otherwise, we become dumbed down to the point where many of us develop McDonald’s vocabularies.
My little effort to combat the trend of our shrinking vocabularies is “The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Synonyms for Common Words”, published this month by Norton. It is intended to bridge the gap between, on one hand, conventional thesauruses, which tend to offer synonyms which are just as common as the base word (did you really need to be reminded that “large”, “huge”, and “enormous” are synonyms for “big”?) and which have no way of dealing with nuances in words, and, on the other, hard word books, which are simply lists of hard words alphabetized by those words and thus cannot be used as reference tools.
